Larry Kart

As the first sentence suggests, Ammons et al. is a whole different type of thing than that Green Mill yack-fest. Nothing wrong with a fair bit of talking back if it's actual talking back and within the code of the scene. Right. And when the chef brongs a birthday cake out to a front table and the band IMMEDIATELY switches into "Happy Birthday to you", that's when you know what it's about. And one of the reasons why jazz stopped being a popular music. "Code of the scene": you all take this stuff much too seriously. MG All I meant by "code of the scene" is knowing within reason who you are and where you are. If that birthday cake were being placed in front of 12-year-old girl and her parents, and you shouted, "Hey, kid, nice tits!" you'd be out of line, even if she did have them.

As the first sentence suggests, Ammons et al. is a whole different type of thing than that Green Mill yack-fest. Nothing wrong with a fair bit of talking back if it's actual talking back and within the code of the scene.

Has anyone mentioned John Dentz? Based on my deliberately limited experience, the guy can hardly play. He ruins every album he's on that I've listened to, and many of them were otherwise promisiing.

You can see as well as hear Budd in great form on that Quincy Jones Jazz Icons DVD.

Hi Mark -- Been watching the Masters too. Didn't realize until your previous post that you were a fellow laborer in the vineyards where I used to press grapes. Googled you, and there you are. Is there an accessible archive of your stuff at the Free Press?

By "lazy-ass" I meant not that there was no effort involved in reporting the story but that the concept was a "lazy-ass" one IMO. That is, if the editor or the chief writer had thought much upfront about the likely factors involved (some of which I spelled out in my previous post), they would have realized that the results that they and Bell got were what one would expect. And the high-toned references aspect of the story -- Kant, Ellsworth Kelly, et al. -- strikes me as what we used to call being a "culture vulture." That is, quote who you will, but only in order to advance a line of thought that otherwise could not be advanced by you, not to pump up the story's status quotient. Do any of those quotes or references tell the reader something that he or she otherwise wouldn't know or that the reporter himself couldn't have figured out and explained to his or her readers? (I'm on the losing side of a long journalistic battle here, but I can't stand "quote whores" and the editors who won't rest easy until you cite an expert who says what you already know.) About most people not getting who Bell was and/or not recognizing (or even noticing) the quality of his playing, far more alarming and revealing to me than this rush-hour subway platform test are the experiences I've had in jazz clubs where people pay substantial cover charges to hear name acts and then proceed to talk at a fairly high volume level throughout the performance. Here, one would think, the "frame" would be in place, but for many people it obviously isn't, or at least not in the way that you or I might want it to be. Thinking about this one very noisy weekend night at the Green Mill in Chicago several years ago and watching the people around me, I think I made some progress toward figuring this out. For me, paying close attention to good music is both absorbing and, for want of a better term, fun. As for the talkers around me, they were of course socializing with each other and drinking and smoking, but they were not wholly oblivious to the music -- they acknowledged the end of each tune with applause and, so it seemed when I began to look closely, they also acknowledged the beginning of the next tune with facial expressions and bodily gestures that suggested they were taking in things like tempo and mood. But after that initial "estimating" moment, the rest of that piece (judging by their behavior) pretty much receded into the background of their consciousness, while to me, if the playing is good, it's this moment and next moment and the next moment and the next that I'm persuing and hanging onto -- with lots of pleasurable-to-me curiosity. Why people like me have that taste or approach and to what degree it's innate or learned is a question for another time, but I know that a lot of people don't have it and that some of those people use the art that I'm forcefully drawn to pay attention to as the (to some degree and in some ways necessary to them) "frame" for other pleasureable-to-them activities. That is, you might think that all those people at the Green Mill that night who were talking over Tim Hagans et al. would have been just as content if they'd been among a similar bunch of people at a bar of comparable nature where interesting live music was not being played. I'm pretty sure, though, that the "frame" that the Green Mill and, that night, Tim Hagans amounted to in their minds was far from incidental -- that if a band that didn't in some sense matter had not been there, most pf these people wouldn't have been there either. I might have tried pursued this further if I had still been a journalist at the time, but I decided that beyond the point I'd reached or thought I'd reached, I really didn't care. Besides, my head hurt.

I don't get it -- this means what about what? First, the operative factor probably is not the kind or the quality of the music Bell was playing but "the fog of a D.C. rush hour." Second, as Wayne Shorter once pointed out, many if not most people take in musical performances primarily in visual terms. If Bell had had a striking "look" of some sort going for him, he would have had more success cutting "through the fog" of rush hour indifference to just about any damn thing this side of an on-going ax murder. Finally, anyone who travels the subway system of any major city runs into lots of buskers. Thus the inclination of most people -- again, minus any striking visual cues -- would be to lump Bell into the class of other players of his type of music one encounters on the subway system on a semi-regular basis. P.S. F--- lazy-ass/cute features journalism. And I say that as a former journalist in what used to be (and may still be) called "the toy department."

P.S. One of the most marvelous examples of all this at work is the Piano-Violin Sonata K. 526 (I have Radu Lupu-Szymon Goldberg). In fact, especially in the last movement, there are places where the "naturally" singing violin responds to the singing artifice of the piano by in turn imitating the piano's natural on-off pulsation/timbral colorations. Also, to push it a fair bit further, you could say that what happens to the male-female pairs of lovers in "Cosi Fan Tutti" is a dramatic extension of the same (or a similar) principle.

Flying in the face of two fire-breathing dragons (Chuck and Clem), I like Uchida in Mozart just fine -- concerti and solo piano works -- but then I have a probably odd view of how the "language" of Mozart's piano music works, one that Uchidia perhaps shares. Briefly, it's based on the paradox of creating an almost literally singing (i.e. vocal in quality) line by accepting or embracing the less-than-vocal nature of the piano (esp. the piano of Mozart's time, though I had this thought prior to the HIP movement) in such a way that one comes close to overcoming the instrument's non-vocal nature in effect while one is also perpetually acknowledging that this is being accomplished by other means, imitatively and through artifice. That is, a sense of "on-off" pulsation -- rhythmic and timbral -- seems to me to lie at the heart of virtually every phrase of Mozartean writing for the piano, as though everything were based on a sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit trill. When the actual succession of pitches in a phrase is not literally trill-like (which is of course almost always the case after a while, or the music wouldn't get anywhere) a sense of inner trill-like pulsation can and should remain present, like a heartbeat -- and from that pulsation moving outwards you get the long singing line, while knowing that that singing quality is forever built on top of and out of mosaic-like bits of "on-" and "off"-ness. If so, again, you get in Mozart's piano writing that dramatic, paradoxical doubleness of effect -- the awareness that the songlike quality is a matter not of nature being true to itself but of nature being "created" through artifice. Or so it seems to me, and I think to my pal Mitsuko. BTW, all this pretty much changes after Mozart.

I like Katchen with Suk in the Brahms violin sonatas -- not saying that they're the best (I'm not in a possition to do that), just that I like them -- but a recent purchase of three 2-CD sets worth of Katchen material from Berkshire, including both Brahms concerti and all the Beethovens, proved to be very ill-advised IMO. Katchen's got good fingers but strikes me as being at once brash/superficial and, as Chuck said, bland, if that combo is possible. Also, at odd times he rushes -- i.e. gets faster in agitated passages -- which is very unsettling. Have never heard his solo Brahms but don't feel that I want to now.

Doesn't look like Maynard. Severinsen could have played that passage -- that is, he had the chops to do it -- but not of course if he's correctly identified as the trumpet soloist; and that jumble of boppish figures certainly sounds like Doc of the time. Might have been a guy named Tony DiNardi. The other candidates I see, looking at Barnet personnel of the time, are either the wrong physical type (Ray Wetzel, John Howell, Lamar Wright Jr.) or not capable of playing way up there (Rolf Ericson).

Perhaps -- I'll look again -- but if so, just on that brief high-note passage. The soloist is Doc Severinsen.

Too bad we don't see Briggs' whole body, but still, his interactions with the music! Also, check under his name on YouTube and there's a clip of him as a kid dancing in a Stepin Fetchit short. It's brief, but wow -- it's like he's floating above the ground.

Loved it since it first came out. Not trying to start something, but it sure shows up Wynton's orchestral "masterpieces."

Agree with most of Larry's post but ask if the Stern/Rose is the old mono. Curious. I like Walter's later stereo recording with Francescatti and much is out of tune. I would also add the Heifitz/Reiner collaboration to the violin concerto sweepstakes. The stereo CBS, Bruno Walter Brahms symphonies are of interest as well. I meant the old mono Stern/Rose/Walter from 1954, but I listened again and scratch that. I must have been going on memories of the LP, because my CD transfer (on one of of two three-disc sets of early Stern recordings) is horribly congested and shrill, much more so than anything else there, including stuff recorded well before that performance; maybe the master tape had deteriorated. In any case, I'll sub a wonderful version I'd forgotten about -- Jacques Thibaud and Pablo Casals with Alfred Cortot conducting from 1929. Lithe and passionate as hell, with Cortot more than holding up his end, it's a better engineered/balanced recording too.

I got the Eugen Jochum mid-1950s Brahms symphony set at Chuck's suggestion when it was reissued on DG Originals (it's still available) and have never regretted it. Marvelous, expansive (for want of a better term) performances. No less marvelous IMO (and the Alpha to Jochum's Omega) is Felix Weingartner's late 1930s Brahms set -- fierce living X-Rays of the works. I have this in a EMI GROC box and it seems to be OOP in that form, at least in the U.S.; can't vouch for the several transfers that are available now. Violin Concerto -- Szigeti with Harty or Ginette Neveu with Dobrowen or Milstein with Jochum (first two vintage performances in mono, last in stereo). Double Concerto -- Oistrakh/Fournier with Galleria or Stern/Rose with Walter And don't forget the magical Horn Trio! For that, I've got an odd one that I love -- Peter Damm, Josef Suk, and Werner Genuit on Acanta, coupled with the two Clarinet Sonatas. I say odd because Damm, First Horn of the Dresden Staatskapelle, has a very Central European tone, fairly rich in expressive vibrato/shadings, which will drive some people nuts but fits what Brahms had in mind, I believe. Another great one is Myron Bloom, Rudolf Serkin, and Michael Tree on a Music from Marlboro Columbia LP, perhaps on CD now, I hope.

Love this one: http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/...os+Ensemble.htm and it's as cheap as the Naxos (plus you get a fine performance of the Mozart).

Given your taste for the Brahms/Schoenberg, you might want to check out Paul Dessau's similiar in spirit, though at times more openly playful/antic, setting for orchestra of Mozart's String Quintet, K. 614: http://www.hbdirect.com/album_detail.php?pid=253087 It gets farther out as it goes along, and a reasonable person might decide that both Dessau and the work were insane. To me, it's fascinating, and I'm sure that Dessau knew exactly what he was up to here in every respect --- but then my own mental stability is questionable.

Piano Concerti 1 and 2 -- I'm fond of Rubinstein-Reiner in 1 and Rubinstein-Krips in 2. In fact I'm discovering that Rubinstein and Brahms were a near-perfect match, much more so IMO than Rubinstein and Chopin. Another gem is Rubinstein's early '30s recording of the first Piano Quartet, with the Pro Arte, coupled with recordings of that vintage of the first violin sonata and the first cello sonata (with Piatagorsky).

Oops -- I reviewed the first series and didn't catch that glitch on the Quincy, though I did say that the second concert wasn't up to the level of the first. I guess it wasn't literally (assuming i.e. that the pitch is off on the flat side).

Speaking of all-girl punk bands and their names, the-soon-to-be wife of one of my son's bandmates in Crush Kill Destroy was in a now defunct but in its time locally (i.e. Chicago) popular all-girl punk band named Twat Vibe, referred to here: http://chillmag.com/july06/features_office.html I always felt that Twat Vibe had a certain ring to it.

Meredith D'Ambrosio does a version of "Moon Dreams" here: http://www.sunnysiderecords.com/release_de...p?releaseID=161 that is clearly informed (as they say) by the Evans-Birth of the Cool recording. Amazing how much of it she conveys with just her voice and a rhythm section.

Here be who John McEntire is ( I assume they spelled the name wrong above, because the rest of McEntire's background fits; he's also a producer/engineer): http://www.trts.com/history/history.html I've heard one member of Antibalas, tenor saxophonist Stuart Bogie, in another setting. He was excellent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VqQszOC2SQ...ted&search= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhBr9XtrNsM...ted&search= Info: Charquet & Co in Laren, Netherlands in 1978.The band was founded in 1967 as Reverend Charkey's Congregation, which was eventually shortened to Charkey & Co,, then finally Frenchified to its final form. Charquet was, of course cornetist Jean-Pierre Morel, who had an admiration for the work of New Orleans trumpeter Sharkey Bonanno. During the more than 10 years of its existence the group developed a repertoire of 450 tunes, of which some 215 were arranged by Morel. In the band here are Jean- Pierre on cornet, Jack Cadieu tb, Alain Marquet cl, Marc Bresdin bar sax, Bernard Thevin piano, Michel Bescont tenor, Lionel Benhamou bj, and Gerard Gervois tuba In the late nineties Morel kind of regrouped and calls his new excellent band "Le Petit Jazz Band" Clarinettist Alain Marquet now plays in the internationally renowned Paris Washboard Band, which plays many jazz festivals in the USA. Me again: I recommend all the Le Petit Jazz Band discs on Stomp Off. And dig the banjo solo here on "Everybody Stomp" by the late Lionel Benhamou. Also, one of the secrets of Charquet and Co. and Le Petit is that they're drummer-less.

Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto #2 and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini -- Arthur Rubinstein, CSO, Reiner (mostly for the Rhapsody, which I picked up the other day on an old LP for 50 cents, an amazing performance, so I sprang for the CD).