Larry Kart

This may have come up before, so perhaps I'm repeating myself and apologize if I am, but "Creativity and Change" was (or began as) an interview I did with Wayne when I was the newish assistant editor at Down Beat under Dan Morgenstern. We printed it under his name because what Wayne had to say was, as I recall, very close to a non-stop monologue. The circumstances of this are perhaps interesting/amusing. I'd gone with Dan to the Plugged Nickel the night before the interview took place, in Sept. or Oct. '68 I think, and approached Wayne between sets with the interview request at Dan's urging -- as I recall, Wayne had turned down the magazine before, and Dan probably thought that an approach by the new young kid might be disarming. But, no, Wayne politely said that he didn't want to do an interview because he really had nothing to say. At this point, Miles -- knowing what my role probably was because I was there with Dan, whom he of course knew -- said from other side of the room (actually yelled hoarsely, to the degree that he could yell any more), "Don't tell him any-thing, Wayne." Wayne took this in, looked at me (no doubt I seemed a bit stunned by what Miles had said, because I certainly was -- brand-new on the job and nervous) and said (perhaps out of simple kindness but also I think because Miles had said "Don't..." to Wayne the contrarian, especially so I think when it came to being told what to do by Miles), "Come by the motel tomorrow afternoon, and we'll do it." When I got there, I'm sure I must have asked some questions, but essentially Wayne just picked up the mike of the tape recorder and spoke into it at length. With his agreement, we printed what he said, slightly edited if at all, not as an interview but as a piece by him, and he was paid accordingly.

Here's my thought -- and because it came to me out of the blue, I guess I'm serious about it. Whatever else goes down, A.J. will save Tony's life, either by semi-accidentally getting in the way of the killer(s) and perhaps getting killed himself or by killing or deflecting them in some fit of rage/petulance or even chaotic farce while they and everyone else are ignoring his pathetic existence. (Remember his attempt to kill his uncle?) In any case, I'm fairly sure that Tony will survive, but in such a way that he and we might think he'd have been better off dead.

Rich Perry's "Hearsay," featuring the compositions and trumpet work of Steve Lampert: http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?...26061&BAB=E Some of the best Perry I've heard, and Lampert is a fascinating one-off -- his writing is somewhat reminiscent of RCA Jazz Workshop-vintage George Russell, but he is definitely own man, a deep cat.

Had the same feeling, but then I thought no. Not sure if they meant to suggest it, or it was just an accident. For instance, I had a feeling, based on the way at one point they shot the entrance to the restaurant where Carmella and Tony were dining, that would-be killers were going to burst in, but either that was an accident (these people aren't every-shot-counts cinematic geniuses, a la Hitchcock) or it was just me. In any case, I don't think it's in Tony's nature to off himself -- unless he were overcome by visions of Nancy Marchand. If Sil went down shooting, so will Tony. On the other hand, his being dumped by Dr. Melfi (a nicely written and performed scene, for the most part) was quite a land mine and might reverberate.

Live in Bologna, 1974. I was there! My first jazz concert (I was 12 then). That's where it all started for me. I'll never forget that evening. luca Love those kind of stories. And I've got that album too.

There are three excellent Baker Steeplechase CDs -- This Is Always, Someday My Prince Will Come, and Daybreak -- recorded at one (!) concert in 1979 with Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson and Doug Raney, and another Steeplechase album by the same band in 1979 in the studio, The Touch of Your Lips. There are also several trio albums with Philip Catherine and Jean-Louis-Rasinfosse, one on Igloo, one on Dreyfus, and two others with Catherine and a bassist (not sure who), one on Criss Cross, the other on Enja. You probably can find samples of Catherine and Raney on the 'Net to see which one it is -- they sound very different. My guess, from what you say, is that it's Raney.

Excellent letter, hope they print it. In the same vein, after someone posted Rafferty's article on another board yesterday, I posted this: Mr. Rafferty says some inaccurate, foolish things in his piece about Chet Baker and the film "Let's Get Lost." 1) "Chet Baker hadn't mattered for a while when Mr. Weber was filming him [in the late 1980s].... He's practically forgotten now." Mattered to whom? Messed up though he was, Baker remained a significant draw in Europe until the end and arguably was a better trumpet player in his later years (when he was in decent physical shape, and sometimes when he was not -- the recorded evidence is considerable). As for "practically forgotten now," that is absurd. Baker recordings proliferate, and how could a "practically forgotten" figure be the subject of a fairly recent and successful (though IMO mostly in terms of favorable reviews) biography, to which Rafferty himself refers, James Gavin's "Deep In A Dream"? 2) "Jazz history hasn't been kind to him; his talent, though real, was thin. Unlike his rival Miles Davis, he persisted, with a stubbornness that suggests a fairly serious failure of imagination, in playing the cool style long past the point at which it had begun to sound mannered and even a little silly." Where does one begin? Leaving aside the dubious/snotty opinions here, most jazz writers regard Baker's music more positively now than at any point in his life -- in part because some of them, as mentioned above, find the best of his later work to be more mature than his early work, in part because the notion of Baker as a necessarily inferior "rival" to Miles Davis is now seen as a relic both of a somewhat understandable but thoughtless Crow Jim-ism and of the assumption that Baker was little more than a pretty-boy jazz matinee idol. Musicians knew better. Miles was Miles, and Chet was Chet -- both quite individual figures, nor does the evidence suggests that Baker was heavily influenced by Davis. 3) "Mr. Baker isn't so much the subject of this picture as its pretext: He's the front man for Mr. Weber's meditations on image making and its discontents. If you want the true story of Chet Baker, you'd do better to look up James Gavin's superb, harrowing 2002 biography, 'Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker,' where you can also find, in the words of a pianist named Hal Galper, perhaps the most perceptive review of Mr. Weber's slippery movie. 'I thought it was great,' Mr. Galper says, 'because it was so jive. Everybody's lying, including Chet. You couldn't have wanted a more honest reflection of him.' That's 'Let's Get Lost,' to the life: the greatest jive movie, or maybe the jivest great movie, ever made." I agree that "Let's Get Lost" is a jive movie, and that Baker serves as a pretext for Bruce Weber's... I would say "manipulations" rather than "meditations." In fact, the best part of James Gavin's otherwise rather ill-informed "Deep In A Dream" is his takedown of Weber, whose character and milieu he seems to know and care (albeit in a hostile way) far more about than he does about the life, art, and times of Chet Baker. Rather than "Deep In A Dream," you'd do better to read Jeroen de Valk's "Chet Baker: His Life and Music" (Berkeley Hills Books). BTW, the by no means uncritical de Valk writes that the 2-CD set "Chet Baker in Tokyo" (Evidence), recorded in 1987, one year before Baker's death, is "his best recording ever." Baker also is in remarkable form on 2-CD set "The Last Concert" (Enja), which was recorded less than a month (!) before his death.

EDC --The Archduke Trio doesn't excite you? In that work BTW I have fond memories of Cortot, Thibaud, Casals, coupled with Schubert's Trio No. 1.

I think I know what you're saying, but the past is never over -- parts of it linger around on a semi-wayward, semi-selective basis (as memory, habits, myth, what have you) and usually you yourself don't get to select what's lingering and what it means to others (maybe even to you) that it's doing so. Likewise, though you and I and many others here would agree about the insidiousness or even the sheer stupidity of the jazz "Neo-Con" game, and while "get on with today's business" sounds good, and "there's a present that can be used to build a tomorrow where it's always going to be today" sounds even better, those phrases suggest to me that you've missed your calling (financially at least) and could make a small fortune as an ad man or a political speech writer; in particular, "there's a present" etc. sounds like it was handmade for Obama or John Edwards. Seriously -- I don't think we live anymore in a world where it could ever "always ... be today." See that Borges story, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," that I posted a link to a few days ago: http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/Borges...is_Tertius.html Finally, some uncharacteristically less than dogmatic (and I think at least obliquely relevant) words from professional nasty-man Theodor Adorno (circa 1961): "Anyone of my age and experience who is both a musician and who thinks about music finds himself in a difficult quandry. One side of it consists in the attitude 'So far and no farther.' In other words, it consists of clinging to one's youth as if modernity were one's own private monopoly. This means resisting at all costs everything which remains inaccessible to one's own experience or at least one's primary basic reactions. This had once been the attitude of confirmed Wagnerians when confronted by Strauss, and the Straussians adopted it in their turn as a defence against the new music of the Schoenberg persuasion. We are perfectly modern ourselves; who are they to offer us tuition? Sometimes, of course, my narcissism, which asserts itself even though I can see through it, has a hard a task persuading itself that the countless composers of music that can only be understood with the aid of diagrams and whose musical inspiration remnains wholly invisible to me can really be all that much more more musical, intelligent, and progressive than myself." Etc. Well maybe not that undogmatic, but there's a smidgen of objectivity and humor there. And I intend to tape to the bathroom mirror "Sometimes ... my narcissism, which asserts itself even though I can see through it..." P.S. That "thumb up" sign is mine.

Yes -- Lodi Carr was there at The Tin Palace, too.

Sorry -- here's where the complete Borges story can be found: http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/Borges...is_Tertius.html The other link seems to be only to its opening paragraphs. Also, if you do read the whole story, the so-called "Postscript" is an essential part of it.

I'm pretty sure that I saw and heard Mobley at The Tin Palace at some point in the '80s. He was in grim shape, could hardly get a sound out of the horn, and IIRC he either left the stand on his own or was ushered off by someone who was looking out for him. Could be that I'm mis-rembering this, and he didn't play at all, but I don't think so.

In that vein, perhaps, here's a key passage from Jorge Luis Borges' great, crazy-funny-sad story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (it can be read in complete form here): http://www.scripps.edu/cb/sullivan/tlon.htm In the very oldest regions of Tlon, it is not an uncommon occurrence for lost objects to be duplicated. Two people are looking for a pencil; the first one finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but more in keeping with his expectation. These secondary objects are called hronir and, even though awkward in form, are a little larger than the originals. Until recently, the hronir were the accidental children of absentmindedness and forgetfulness. It seems improbable that the methodical production of them has been going on for almost a hundred years, but so it is stated…. The first attempts were fruitless. Nevertheless, the modus operandi is worthy of note. The director of one of the state prisons announced to the convicts that in an ancient riverbed certain tombs were to be found, and promised freedom to any prisoner who made an important discovery. In the months preceding the excavation, printed photographs of what was to be found were shown the prisoners. The first attempt proved that hope and zeal could be inhibiting; a week of work with shovel and pick succeeded in unearthing no hron other than a rusty wheel, postdating the experiment. This was kept a secret, and the experiment was later repeated in four colleges. In three of them the failure was almost complete; in the fourth (the director of which died by chance during the initial excavation), the students dug up—or produced—a gold mask, an archaic sword, two or three earthenware urns, and the moldered mutilated torso of a king with an inscription on his breast which has so far not been deciphered. Thus was discovered the unfitness of witnesses who were aware of the experimental nature of the search.... Mass investigations produced objects which contradicted one another; now, individual projects, as far as possible spontaneous, are preferred. The methodical development of hronir has been of enormous service to archeologists. It has allowed them to question and even to modify the past, which nowadays is no less malleable or obedient than the future. One curious fact: the hronir of the second and third degrees—that is, the hronir derived from another hron, and the hronir derived from the hron of a hron—exaggerate the flaws of the original; those of the fifth degree are almost uniform; those of the ninth can be confused with those of the second; and those of the eleventh degree have a purity of form which the originals do not possess. The process is a recurrent one; a hron of the twelfth degree begins to deteriorate in quality. Stranger and more perfect than any hron is sometimes the ur, which is a thing produced by suggestion, an object brought into being by hope. The great gold mask I mentioned previously is a distinguished example. Things duplicate themselves in Tlon. They tend at the same time to efface themselves, to lose their detail when people forget them. The classic example is that of a stone threshold which lasted as long as it was visited by a beggar, and which faded from sight on his death. Occasionally, a few birds, a horse perhaps, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.

In some interview Hampton noticed that bop was nothing new to him - he was capable of hearing complex harmonies and to play alongside as early as with Goodman quartet. It occurred to me once that there's a link between Hampton and Monk -- their shared penchant for the whole-tone scale for one thing, but also their rhythm makes melodies/melodies are rhythms thinking. I can hear them playing "Blue Monk" together. P.S. As for Monk's Swing Era roots, everyone who digs Monk needs to hear Teddy Wilson's walking tempo version of "'Round Midnight" on Wilson's "And Then They Wrote..." (originally on Columbia, now on Collectables coupled with "Mr. Wilson and Mr. Gershwin"). The whole album is fine; another real eye-opener there is Wilson's version of "Artistry In Rhythm."

OK -- I'm going on what I've heard from LT many years ago, around the time of his album with Warne and the stuff with Toshiko's orchestra of that vintage. That was my reaction at the time to a fair amount of the LT I heard then; and it was sufficiently strong to make me not want to go there anymore. I'll take your word that LT's grown over the years. What in particular of his later work would you recommend? Your Land/Grossman experience is a wonderful example of the hall of mirrors that people of our vintage(s) can find ourselves in -- not to mention the halls through which the players themselves were moving. A somewhat forgotten figure in this general stylistic realm was Sal Nistico, who got ----ed up in the usual ways and went off to Europe, dying much too young in 1991. Sal remained Sal always (Rollins going back toward Ammons a bit were his roots, I think), and he got deeper and better over time. There's a fine, really soulful 1988 album of him with an Italian rhythm section, "Empty Room" (Red). Speaking of LT and Toshiko, a perhaps odd little story. I heard the band in a club in Chicago in the early to mid-1980s and didn't much care for her writing. To me it sounded kind of "off"-busy, if you know what I mean -- as though she were just laying "blowing"-type lines on top of each other without that much of a sense of how things were going to work out in orchestral terms (vertically in particular). That problem, if indeed it is/was one, was highlighted when the band played a chart that Frank Wess had written for them. Yes, his style and goals were somehat different from Toshiko's, but it was remarkable to hear, cheek to jowl, how well his writing worked in both the linear and vertical dimensions versus (IMO) Toshiko's at times cluttered awkwardness in the latter realm. So I wrote about that in a review and a few days later got a letter from none other that Bill Russo, who had been in the audience that night, saying that he'd long felt that way about Toshiko's writing and was glad that somebody had finally said it. Of course, Russo was or could be an edgy, cranky, highly opinionated guy, but it struck me as interesting that he would feel that way.

Interesting comments, Peter. I know exactly what you mean (I think) about Harold Land because I went through the same experience -- digging Land at the time when he was with Clifford and Max days, feeling that he had reached a peak of maturity and individuality with his recordings for Contemporary as a leader and sideman, then hearing how Trane broke over him like a huge wave, leaving him less individual and less satisfying than he had been before, though the arguable inevitability of what was going on here -- i.e. there was, I believe, nothing vogue-ish in Land's Trane fascination; something in Trane really spoke to him -- always made me want to hear later Land too, even though I preferred him in his "Harold In The Land of Jazz" and "The Fox" period. About Rollins, though, my point still is -- and different people will hear and feel this differently -- that certain key aspects of Rollins' style are so damn personal (in part because in the drama of Rollin's solos, they're the most direct tokens of emotion; in part because Rollins often handles those tokens in a unique, humorous-ironic manner) that IMO they sound less than genuine and even rather creepy when they're coming out of other people's horns. To explain further, here from my book are the liner notes I wrote (slightly modified at the very end) for the 1972 reissue of "Worktime": Most jazz fans, myself included, tend to view the process of jazz creation in a dramatic, even romantic light. If the artistic product is turbulent, passionate, noble, etc., we feel that the circumstances surrounding its creation must have been similar in tone. As one has more contact with musicians, though, one discovers that it is rarely that simple--musical events that to the listener seem immensely dramatic may have been created in a casual, “let’s get the job done” manner. I mention this as a mild corrective, for if ever there was a recording that deserved the term “dramatic,” Worktime is it. The situation was this: Sonny Rollins, who by 1954 had established himself as the best young tenorman in jazz, moved to Chicago for most of 1955 and “wood-shedded” (that apt jazz term for artistic self-examination). He emerged to join the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet, and when he recorded Worktime on December 2, 1955, it was his first appearance on record since October 1954, when recorded as a sideman with Thelonious Monk. “Worktime” was a dramatic and startling event, then and now, because it revealed that during his sabbatical Rollins had made a quantum jump in every area of musical procedure. He was no longer “the best young tenorman” but a major innovator whose achievements would have implications for the future course of jazz that have not yet been exhausted, either by himself or by all those he has influenced. Most obviously, there was an increase in rhythmic assurance and sonoric variety on Rollins’s part. But these and other seemingly technical gains were all in the service of a shift in sensibility, a unique attitude toward his material that had only been hinted at in his previous work. I imagine that everyone who admires Rollins’s music has commented on its humorous quality, though there seems to be agreement that “humorous,” by itself, is not an adequate description. David Himmelstein has added the information that it is “the humor of inwit, of self-consciousness or, as Sonny once aptly put it, the consciousness of a generation nourished on ‘Lux -- you know, the Radio Theatre,’ ” and Max Harrison has given us the terms “sardonic” and “civilized irony.” But the best guide I have found to the sensibility that emerges on Worktime is a remarkable article by Terry Martin titled “Coleman Hawkins and Jazz Romanticism” that appeared in he October 1963 issue of Jazz Monthly. In commenting on Hawkins’s version of “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” (which can be heard on the album Soul ) Martin says that “the whole is a finely shaped drama. Dramatic structure may in fact point to the core of Hawkins’s art. He handles his materials with the ease and cunning of a great dramatist, and as with great drama the meaning may not correspond exactly with what the characters are made to say. It is the personae and the relations generated between them that contain the essence of the achievement.” Much of this also applies to Rollins, though his kind of drama differs in form and content from Hawkins’s. A comparison between “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” and “There Are Such Things” from Worktime may show what the differences are. As Martin points out, one of Hawkins’s methods is to make an initial statement that is romantic in character and then juxtapose it with “highly emotive rhythmic figures” that eventually lead back to the original mood. It is as though he were saying, “Yes, romance does exist, but I want to show you the tough reality that lies underneath.” Structurally, Hawkins’s drama is double in effect but single in method--i.e., allowing for foreshadowing devices, he presents one personae at a time--while with Rollins the method as well as the final effect is double ( at the least). No statement is allowed to rest unqualified by him for more than a few measures, and often the very tone quality and accentuation with which a phrase is presented is felt as an ironic commentary upon it. The implications of such an approach are numerous. For one, even though Rollins can retain and heighten the pattern of linear motivic evolution that was hailed enthusiastically by Gunther Schuller as “thematic improvising,” the effect of constant renewal produced by his simultaneous or near-simultaneous expression of multiple points of view is, I believe, the more radical and lasting development, for it enables the soloist to achieve an emotional complexity that before was largely the province of such orchestral masters as Duke Ellington, whose every band member is potentially a musical/dramatic character. Also, it opens the door to a new view of the jazz past, for the improviser can now range beyond the apparent boundaries of style and make use of any musical material that his taste for drama can assimilate. Rollins’s frequent use of such unlikely vehicles as “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Sonny Boy,” “In a Chapel in the Moonlight,” “Wagon Wheels,” and “If You Were the Only Girl in the World” can be seen in this light--for while one wouldn’t swear that none of these pieces (and there are many more like them) appeals to Rollins on essentially musical grounds, it’s a safe bet that he is drawn to them because he likes to evoke, toy with, and comment upon their inherent strains of corniness, prettiness, and sentimentality . And by bringing orchestral/dramatic resources into the range of the individual soloist, Rollins may have given to jazz just the tool it needs to survive the apparent exhaustion of the emotional resources open to the improviser whose relationship to his material is one to one, which is what I think can be heard in the later work of John Coltrane. The finest tracks on Worktime, for me, are “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Raincheck,” and “There Are Such Things.” Notice, in particular, the utterly unexpected insertion of the verse of “Show Business” (where Rollins is accompanied only by Morrow’s strong bass line) right after the theme statement. What results is quintessentially Rollins-esque, a compulsively swinging, serio-comic tour de force that at once embraces and bemusedly holds at arms’ length the flag-waving fact of Ethel Merman’s existence.

Per Dreier -- excellent set. Wish I'd held onto it instead of replacing it with N. Jarvi's DG CD set . Live and learn.

Happy Birthday, Jim! You are our leader.

Also, not to dig my toe in the ground, but the only cachet I think I should have or that I want to have is if what I'm saying seems interesting and makes sense. If it doesn't, there's no badge that will make it so.

I'm not saying that LT is a Rollins copier or that he's not readily recognizable as himself. Rather, my point is that LT incorporates into his own work (or used to incorporate -- I left the room some years ago, there's only so much time) a fair number of Rollins' most personal "emotive figures" -- those chortles, burps, guffaws etc. that every fan of vintage Rollins is familiar with. Further, as I tried to explain, those figures seem to me to be so personal to Rollins, especially in terms of the humorous/ironic role they played in his musical language as a whole, that their decorative use by other players just creeps me out, especially when it serves (as it almost always does) as a sign of how "heated" and "emotional" they are or are supposed to be at that point in their solo. So when you get all lathered up to the point where you are semi-overcome, you're moved to speak in/"borrow" Sonny's voice? Something about that ain't right IMO.

Indeed, he did! Jack Lewis was the A&R man behind many of Victor's best jazz releases from the fifties. Yes, he did supervise the Jazz Workshop series, but judging by the nature of much of his less adventurous work for RCA, I think he essentially just OK'd the JW projects (for which he certainly deserves credit). The musical supervision, I'd bet, was pretty much in the hands of the respective composers-leaders: George Russell, Hal McKusick, et al. Again, I wouldn't mind having full access to the RCA/Jack Lewis jazz catalogue of the time and being able to pick and chose, but there was IMO an air of routine to the typical RCA date of the Lewis era. And when there was some welcome focus and spark, as on the Cohn-Perkins-Kamuca album, I suspect it came from the musicians taking things in their own hands far more than from Lewis. Another way to look at it is that the RCA/Lewis material was essentially a byproduct of the relatively flush NYC recording studio scene of the mid-1950s, when guys like Milt Hinton, Osie Johnson, Al Cohn, Nick Travis, Barry Galbraith, Bernie Glow, Billy Byers, Manny Albam, etc. were playing in and/or writing for a floating studio big band that found itself in whole or in part in recording studios on dates of all kinds as often as 16 or more hours a day. Thus an air of the routine was almost inevitable when those guys assembled, though it could be broken through. I would say that the vast majority of the guys who recorded for RCA were drawn from that pool of musicians, with the exception of actual Basie-ites like Joe Newman, Thad Jones, Henry Coker, etc., and the West Coast people that RCA recorded (who were of course drawn from the LA equivalent to the NYC studio scene -- though I don't know if Lewis was the A&R man for the West Coast material). What potential Mosaics are in all that material? I don't have a list of all the stuff that RCA produced in the Jack Lewis era (BTW, I see that Al Cohn with Four Trumpets album is on the new Mosaic set), but unfortunately it looks like Fresh Sound has been there first in many instances ("unfortunately" because Mosaic could do it better and also because even when Fresh Sound is operating on the square, it feels to me like they are not). I believe that much, maybe all, of the Jazz Workshop material (George Russell, Hal McKusick, et al.) material has made it to Fresh Sound, plus there's a Fresh Sound that combines some RCA McKusick (the date with a string quartet and Manny Albam charts -- much better than one might think, with some gorgeous McKusick clarinet) with stuff he did at the time for other labels. A Rod Levitt Mosaic Select has been wished for before. For those with a taste for such things (I'd probably bite), a Sauter-Finegan Mosaic would be nice. Whatever else, those were fantastic-sounding recordings, and it would fun to hear them restored to their original glory if possible. Is there enough for a Mosaic Select of the Maynard Ferguson Dream Band? I'd probably pass, much preferring Maynard's band of the Roulette era, but it would be nice to have the option. Of individual albums of note, Mosaic has already done "The Brothers." RCA's subsidiary labels "X" and VIK had some interesting stuff: one forgotten gem is a Chuck Wayne big band/small group album with some of trumpeter Don Joseph's best solo work, "String Fever," reissued on CD on Euphoria, a guitar-oriented label; there are George Handy's two for "X," a blowing date with Allen Eager, Ernie Royal, and Kai Winding, and an interesting if precious at times orchestral album whose title I can't recall, both I believe on Fresh Sound now; and I've always had a soft spot for John Benson Brooks "Folk Jazz USA" (VIK), with Nick Travis, Zoot on alto, and Cohn on baritone. Fresh Sound also has put out the Nick Travis RCA quintet album with the Flora cover, "The Riot Is On," a collection of RCA Pete Jolly small group material that I have on order, and, I'm sure, much else that RCA did on the West Coast, including lots of Shorty Rogers. I'd love to see a complete list of RCA jazz albums from the '50s. I probably heard most of them at the time. But please spare me from "The Drum Suite"!

You're right, but I don't recall that I went into much detail. My main problem is that while I love vintage Sonny Rollins and in principle have to admit the possibility of there being good-to-excellent Rollins-influenced tenormen, when guys start to come up with some of Rollins's very specific/personal chortles, burps, and guffaws (as I think Tabackin does; in fact, LT not only imitates but also often exaggerates them), I run from the room with my hair on fire. Now it would be possible, of course, though difficult, to do what I think LT does as a sort of further humorous/ironic commentary on Rollins's own fairly extreme (and again quite personal) tendencies in that direction. But what I hear from LT and some other Rollins-drenched guys from his and later generations sounds to me like puppetry -- not that it's easy to do, but I feel like I'm listening to someone snatch away another unique man's living breath. I'd say BTW that this is not true, or not true to the same degree or in the same way, of most Trane disciples of however many generations -- while problems certainly lie in wait for them, the problem of speaking so directly in another man's voice is not high among them because I think Trane's "cry" was to some considerable degree generic (I mean that positively, as though Trane's voice were both personal and also inherently that of many or even a multitude, a la the bare-breasted woman at the barricades in Delacroix's famous painting; the same might be said of Young or Hawkins [though for somewhat different reasons in both cases, but Rollins' voice, when it gets emotionally specific in the way I have in mind. is not at all generic IMO]). An example of a Rollins-drenched guy who usually doesn't give me that "stealing the living breath" feeling would be Ralph LaLama. Among younger players, an interesting case is Grant Stewart -- who has considerable melodic and rhythmic gifts but can at times get too close for my tastes to specific Rollins-esque emotive figures; and now that I've stumbled aross that phrase, "emotive figures," perhaps that's the gist of what I have in mind. Rollins came up with and handled such figures in a way that I think was both new to jazz and unique to himself, in that these emotive figures not only were highly (almost luridly) emotive but also were quite self-consciously/knowingly (and usually humorously/ironically) so, such that the play between those figures and the rest of his musical-emotional vocabulary was a key part of his language. Can't think of many Rollins-influenced guys who have much a clue there. Actually, Archie Shepp probably did for a hot minute. And Ed Wilkerson Jr. does.

Of this piece, if I had to choose, Perlemutter. Likewise with much of Chopin, but I'm certainly not up on everything that's available -- don't know Engerer and Feltsman for example, though I do know and like some of Feltsman's Bach. I have tried much of Rubinstein's RCA Chopin, mono and stereo; it always seems bland to me, despite AR's reputation in this music. Again, I think other composers, esp. Brahms, were his real forte. On the other hand, I haven't heard AR's EMI Chopin (from the 1930s), which is said to be much more urgent. His EMI version of Op. 44 certainly is, but, as mentioned above, it is sabotaged by the inability of the recording to capture a key sotto voce passage.

I knew I should have kept my mouth shut.

Indeed, he did! Jack Lewis was the A&R man behind many of Victor's best jazz releases from the fifties. Yes, he did supervise the Jazz Workshop series, but judging by the nature of much of his less adventurous work for RCA, I think he essentially just OK'd the JW projects (for which he certainly deserves credit). The musical supervision, I'd bet, was pretty much in the hands of the respective composers-leaders: George Russell, Hal McKusick, et al. Again, I wouldn't mind having full access to the RCA/Jack Lewis jazz catalogue of the time and being able to pick and chose, but there was IMO an air of routine to the typical RCA date of the Lewis era. And when there was some welcome focus and spark, as on the Cohn-Perkins-Kamuca album, I suspect it came from the musicians taking things in their own hands far more than from Lewis. Another way to look at it is that the RCA/Lewis material was essentially a byproduct of the relatively flush NYC recording studio scene of the mid-1950s, when guys like Milt Hinton, Osie Johnson, Al Cohn, Nick Travis, Barry Galbraith, Bernie Glow, Billy Byers, Manny Albam, etc. were playing in and/or writing for a floating studio big band that found itself in whole or in part in recording studios on dates of all kinds as often as 16 or more hours a day. Thus an air of the routine was almost inevitable when those guys assembled, though it could be broken through. I would say that the vast majority of the guys who recorded for RCA were drawn from that pool of musicians, with the exception of actual Basie-ites like Joe Newman, Thad Jones, Henry Coker, etc., and the West Coast people that RCA recorded (who were of course drawn from the LA equivalent to the NYC studio scene -- though I don't know if Lewis was the A&R man for the West Coast material).