Larry Kart

Think I was around for some of the Hammond thing -- if so, I mostly remember the toxic presence of Mr. McDonough, who was understandably and alternately both slavish and full of himself. Benny Goodman was there, right? And Bob Dylan was or was expected to show? If so, what a brew. The Carter club date is tantilizingly on the edge of memory, but I can't say for sure. Wilbur used to say "Old Man Jo Jones" (with a reminiscent "I still can't believe it" warmth of tone in his voice) rather than Papa Jo Jones -- the way you might refer to the god Apollo if you'd happened to have seen him eat breakfast. Wilbur said that hearing the vintage Basie band (probably at the Regal Theatre) was what made him want to play drums rather than bass (his plan after he'd heard Blanton with Ellington on "Jack the Bear" and "Pitter Panther Patter"). "He used to," said Wilbur, "make the sock cymbals breathe."

Was googling Mat Matthews, Dutch jazz accordion player who came to the U.S. in the '50s and made some nice albums for Dawn and other labels (one on Dawn -- With Farmer, Gryce, Pettiford, K. Clarke et al. -- was exceptional) and found out that he'd returned to the Netherlands some time ago, where he worked with clarinetist-saxophonist Jos Valster in duo called The Shmuck and the Schmo. Didn't say who was who. Don't know Valster's music, but apparently he's a pal of Tony Scott.

I think that Dorsey recording is "Grand Central Getaway." Gillespie is listed as a co-composer and arranger. That was a fine, distinctive band.

A bonus on The Philadelphians is a fantastic muted Lee Morgan solo on "You're Not The Kind" -- what continuity! Also, this is one of the few recorded performances (maybe the only?) by the bass-drum team of Percy Heath and P.J. Jones, who are superb together (along with Ray Bryant).

"Stockholm Sojurn" has some nice writing but probably should be passed up by all but completists. No Golson solo work IIRC. I too like "Terminal 1." I also recall "California Message" and "One More Mem'ry" (both with Fuller, from the early '80s) as being very nice, provided you can take the arguably rather narcissistic bass work of Bob Magnusson.

I and Nate Dorward (visiting from Toronto) heard Golson live at the Jazz Showcase last year. He was in very fine form (i.e. Golson; Nate was in fine form too).

Here, from my book, are two attempts to put the pieces of Art Pepper together. The second one is more to the point we're talking about, but the first adds some context: ART PEPPER The first of these two pieces about Art Pepper was written two years after the first; they appear here in reverse chronological order because, in effect, the obituary attempts to sum up Pepper’s life and artistic achievement, while the second piece, a response to Pepper’s autobiography, Straight Life, tries to explore the reasons why an artist who lived in such a turbulent, frequently self-destructive manner could produce music whose key trait was an often exquisite orderliness and grace. [1982] There will be no more of Art Pepper’s passionate, exquisitely structured music. One of jazz’s great alto saxophonists, Pepper died Tuesday morning of heart failure in a Los Angeles-area hospital, never having regained consciousness after he suffered a stroke six days before. He was fifty-six. “A pioneer of progressive jazz” was the way one wire-service obituary spoke of him, and to the degree that there ever was such a music as “progressive jazz,” Pepper did bear some relation to it--but only because, having worked successfully within “progres¬sive” contexts he defined their limitations by effortlessly transcending them. An artist whose sense of musical order was seemingly innate, he was often stimulated by complex external structures, but in their absence his own form-giving qualities were rich. The “pioneer” tag is also dubious, for Pepper--unlike, say, Lester Young, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker--did not inaugurate a broadly influential style (though there were a few Pepper disciples). Nor was his attitude toward the jazz artists who preceded him in any sense iconoclastic. A trio of Swing-Era players--alto saxophonists Benny Carter and Willie Smith and tenor saxophonist Joe Thomas--were his initial inspirations, and the symmetry and warmth that characterized their music were qualities Pepper never relinquished. But his own symmetries, for all their grace and apparent ease, bore the marks of intense internal pressure, while his warmth and humanity were those of a man who had to define and test himself anew each time he picked up his horn. From the first, self-expression was Pepper’s goal, and in that sense, aided by his natural ear and burgeoning instrumental facility, he was a jazz musician long before he became familiar with the music. The vital familiarizing process took place while Pepper was still in his teens, at jam sessions in Los Angeles’s Central Avenue district. Joining Stan Kenton’s Orchestra after brief stints with the bands of Gus Arnheim and Carter, Pepper recorded his first solo, “Harlem Folk Dance,” in 1943 and, after Army service and work as a Los Angeles-based freelancer, he returned to Kenton in 1947. This was the period when Pepper became a star of sorts, and on “Art Pepper,” the piece that Kenton trumpeter Shorty Rogers wrote for him in 1950, and on the 1951 “Over the Rainbow,” recorded with Rogers’s octet, Pepper’s suave lyricism and knifelike rhythmic zeal already marked him as a special artist. It was in this period that Pepper became a heroin addict, which led over the next two decades to long absences from the scene and several jail terms. But in the midst of this external chaos, Pepper was perfecting and deepening his music. From 1956 to 1960, his first stage of true maturity, he produced one masterly recorded performance after another: “Besame Mucho,” “I Surrender Dear,” “Pepper Pot,” “Old Croix,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” “ All the Things You Are,” “Rhythm-a-ning,” “Winter Moon”--the list is a long one. But eventually the authorities and Pepper’s personal demons had their way, and he was not to make another significant recording until 1975. Pepper returned to jazz with all his skills intact and with his expressive range having increased under the weight of his long ordeal. On any given night until the very end--his last Chicago performance, which took place only two weeks before his stroke, was typical--Pepper challenged himself to the utmost. In his life, Art Pepper seemed to be skating at the edge of an abyss. And yet his music managed to encompass that sense of danger, seeking and finding a wholeness that was, so it seems, denied to its maker. [1980] Like most autobiographies that purport to tell all, Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper is a tissue of genuine revelations and willful posing, in which the desire to speak the truth is at war with the author’s need to paint himself as a romantic victim. But because Straight Life was written by a major jazz musician, the book does tell us a great deal--about the so-called “jazz life” and also about the tensions that affect almost every artist who functions in the modern world. There are any number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists whose lives and whose work expressed an inner emotional turmoil that bordered on self-destruction--Poe, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Scriabin, Hart Crane, the list could go on and on. But the hallmarks of Art Pepper’s music are lucidity, grace, and a meticulous sense of order. How, one wonders, can those qualities be reconciled with a life so internally chaotic that much of Straight Life reads like a suicide note? The title of the book, borrowed from that of Pepper’s swift little melody on the changes of “After You’ve Gone,” is deliberately ironic, because “straight” is the one thing the alto saxophonist’s life has never been. Born on September 1, 1925, in Gardena, California, he was the byproduct of a brief, stormy romance. His teenaged mother wanted an abortion, his father married her only because he wanted the child to live, and much of Pepper’s youth was spent away from both parents, in the care of his stern paternal grandmother. The account in Straight Life of those early years is grim, but it would have meaning only to Pepper’s friends if it were not for his great musical gifts. From the first he seems to have been a “natural,” with a drive toward self-expression that logically led him toward jazz, although the account of his youthful initiation into that world strikes a note of naïveté that echoes throughout the book. Told by a guitarist that “these are the chords to the blues . . . this is black music, from Africa, from the slave ships that came to America,” Pepper recalls that “I asked him if he thought I might have the right to play jazz.” Musically, the answer to Pepper’s question obviously was “yes,” as it was for Bix Beiderbecke, Pee Wee Russell, and many other white jazzmen. But the fact that Pepper felt compelled to ask (or says that he did--the anecdote sounds a little too pat to be literally true) suggests that emotionally he would forever feel uncertain that his unquestioned ability to play jazz made him part of the jazz community. While still in his teens Pepper worked in predominantly black bands led by Lee Young and Benny Carter and hung out in Los Angeles’s Central Avenue district, where a free and easy racial comradeship prevailed. “There,” Pepper recalls, “everybody just loved everybody else, or if they didn’t, I didn’t know about it.” Young, remembering that same era, says, “It wasn’t about ‘whitey’ this and ‘whitey’ that. It was about good musicianship and people respecting one another for the talents that they had.” Pepper’s talents, which evolved further during a stint with Stan Kenton’s orchestra, required him to forge his own style, one that owed a debt to black jazzmen but was significantly different in that his music seemed increasingly to have uncertainty and isolation as its subject. Then, after a tour of Army duty that led to the disintegration of his first marriage, Pepper returned to Kenton and found, in 1950, what was for him to be the “answer”--heroin. At this point in Straight Life, Pepper makes no excuses. Having found “no peace at all except when I was playing,” he felt, under the influence of the drug, that “I loved myself…I loved my talent. I said, ‘This is it. This is the only answer for me…whatever dues I have to pay.’ I realized that from that moment on I would be, if you want to use the word, a junkie. And that’s what I still am.” If Straight Life were an exemplary tale, Pepper’s career from then until now would be an unbroken account of personal and artistic disintegration. But while he would spend more than a third of the following three decades in jail on various narcotics charges and would involve himself in a mutually self-destructive second marriage, these are also the years of Pepper’s greatest musical triumphs. One answer to this seeming paradox might be that Straight Life is a con job, an attempt by the author to paint himself as a larger-than-life-size rogue. But even if the grimmer anecdotes in the book are discounted, Pepper’s physical presence today is enough to confirm their essential truth. A strikingly handsome man at one time--reminiscent of Tyrone Power, according to a friend--Pepper is now someone whose haunted, ravaged face clearly proclaims that he has never needed to conjure up imaginary demons. Straight Life finally does give us the information we need to resolve the split between Pepper’s willfully disordered life and his carefully ordered music. Indeed, the answer may be found in an aspect of the book that at first seems quite frustrating--in the author’s reluctance to talk about his music and in his corresponding eagerness to relate the lurid details of his sex life, drug addiction, and prison experiences. That music is important to Pepper is believable only if we already know his music; otherwise Straight Life might be the story of any junkie. But soon we realize that, for Pepper, music, drugs, sex, and prison life are, in one sense, all of a piece--or rather, they all seem to be jumbled together in one area of his mind, a realm in which instinctual intelligence exists alongside childlike cunning, in which self-determined forms of order and expression blend into the trials of shame and pride that a lawbreaker’s life tends to bring. For example, Pepper states with special pride that he has never been an informer, never turned in a drug connection. From his point of view, that is an honorable, certain, and essentially private act, a matter between peers in a closed society. And in their various ways, both drug use and sex share similar qualities. One gets high or one does not, in the privacy of one’s own nervous system. One satisfies oneself and one’s partner or one does not, also in relatively private circumstances. And so Pepper feels free to boast about all these things. But music is an exception for him because, like all forms of art, its ultimate meaning cannot be private, cannot be controlled by the artist; other people will take what the artist creates and make of it what they will. Of course, in the jazz world, particularly the world of the black jazz musician, communal agreements have often prevailed between the musicians and the audience , and almost almost always among the musicians themselves . But Pepper no longer seems to trust either of those communities, if he ever did. From his point of view, the comradeship of Central Avenue is gone forever. Instead, the isolated modern artist par excellence, he tries to create his own private world--striving for perfect, spontaneous order because only then will what he creates remain within his control. And, of course, every time he performs, he fails, for his music becomes more lucid and moving to us, and less private to him, the closer he comes to formal perfection. So, for Art Pepper, the tensions remain; and as Straight Life demonstrates, they periodically become too great to be borne. But for us, one step removed from Pepper, the tensions are resolved. And that is the final paradox, that his music may do more for us than it can ever do for him.

You picked a fine one to start, but these two from roughly that period are excellent: http://www.amazon.com/Benny-Golson-Philade...02-6102086-6514 http://www.amazon.com/Free-Benny-Golson-Qu...253&sr=1-31 The second in particular should be snapped up; it's terrific, cheap, and OOP. I'll add that the Fuller-Golson pairing, so fine on "Groovin' With Golson," doesn't always yield topnotch results IMO. See "The Other Side of Benny Golson," which has its moments but isn't locked in the way "Groovin With Golson" is. On the other hand, Fuller's "Bluesette" with Golson (both the Savoy original and a '80s or '90s reunion date, same band) is/are really nice. Also, you probably should hear Golson on Art Farmer's "Modern Art."

My remark was prompted not by any desire to knock Jo Jones as a musician but because several people had said things like "...the cat was so freakin' HAPPY!!! Look at him when plays; his face just radiates JOY!" And I'm not saying that his music wasn't full of happiness and joy -- for us and in some sense for him. I'm just saying that the relationship between beautiful, joyful music-making and beautiful, joyful personhood (for want of a better term) isn't always simple and is sometimes near impossible to disentangle. I've still never figured out how Artie Shaw could play like an angel and be such a pompous, egotistical jerk. By comparison, putting Art Pepper the man and the musician together is child's play.

Very interesting post, Mark -- raises some interesting questions, too, for those of us who admire both KD and Shaw but perhaps wonder at times whether the presence of diatonic linking notes in KD led to more/deeper continuity, potential variety, while the absence of them in Shaw boxed him into a corner or atmosphere of striving and strain, however noble and necessary it might have been to be there. I guess I'm saying, in part, that you can't chose what your temperaament as an artist is and how your temperament and talents fit into the your historical position, i.e. what's open to be done at a particular point in the continuum.

I'm sorry, but I've heard from many sources that Jones, great player though he was, was just ----ing nuts and often a pain in the ass to work with.

Check out the band that my son is a member of, the somewhat ironically named Crush Kill Destroy (they're certainly loud, but the name comes from what a rogue andriod keeps saying in a episode of "Lost In Space"): http://www.crushkilldestroy.net/rock/ckd/ Stuff to listen to there. Among their admirers is guitarist Ty Braxton, Anthony Braxton's talented offspring.

That's the one!! Mine is called "I Love My Baby"---Joe Newman going modal!! Great stuff! I will check out Mr. Kart's suggestions You can check out a bit of the O. Nelson/J. Newman "St. Louis Blues" here: http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/arti...,219352,00.html Perhaps there's a way to listen to all of it for free, but I'm no wizard when it comes to such things. The Verve Jazz Masters album it comes from seems to be OOP, but the piece is now on the Mosaic Nelson set. Shad Collins is good on those Prestige Basie alumni albums. There were two of them IIRC, one with just Collins and Quinichette, another with Jack Washington and perhaps others added. If you dig Collins, you need to hear the date that Dicky Wells, Collins, and two other members of the Teddy Hill trumpet section (Bill Coleman and Bill Dillard) made with Django Reinhardt in Paris in 1937. Great stuff all around, as is the rest of the date with just Coleman, Wells, Reinhardt and rhythm -- "Japanese Sandman" and "Hangin' 'Round Boudon" especially. Actually, I think Bill Coleman influenced Phil Grenadier.

Another very nice one is his own album "The Essential Jo Jones" -- rec. 1955 for Vanguard -- especially "Shoe Shine Boy," which reunites the original Basie rhythm section behind Emmett Berry, Lucky Thompson, and Bennie Green. IIRC, it's Nat Pierce on the other tracks from that date.

The weird spread is on all the tracks in the Japanese issue. It sounds like Art is to the left of my left speaker and thus, at times, in a different sonic space than Warne. (A reverse polarity thing? Oh no!) I want a mono switch too.

I agree on Shad Collins -- a good idea. On the other hand, I prefer Collins to Newman -- more individuality and rhythmic, timbral "sting," though perhaps Newman suffers a bit in my mind because there was so much of him on record in the '50s when I was young fan (all those somewhat generic RCA neo-Basie dates), while Collins didn't record that much after his Basie days, though he sounds fine w/Vic Dickinson on Vanguard from the mid-1950s. Also, Newman could be quite "eclectic," if that's the right word. He does a unnervingly good variation on/impression of Miles Davis on Oliver Nelson's setting of "St. Louis Blues" (rec. 1966). I can't imagine that Shad Collins ever could or would want to sound like Miles.

Looks like the Japanese issue has some different tunes: ... 6. Avalon - (studio) 7. Tickle Toe - (studio) 8. Warnin (Take 1) - (studio) 9. Warnin (Take 2) - (studio) 10. Stomping At The Savoy - (studio) Compared to the one available at Amazon: ... 6. Tickle Toe 7. The Man I Love 8. Autumn Leaves 9. The Way You Look Tonight Any opinions as to whether "Avalon", the two takes of "Warnin'" and "Savoy" are worth $20 more than "Man I Love", "Autumn Leaves" and "The Way You Look Tonight"? Oh hell yeah. The Japanese version is all Warne/Pepper, whereas the American issue is a straight reissue of the LP, which was Warne/Art on one side & Pepper "leftovers" from other sessions on the other. Both are certainly worthy issues, but in my world (and using the EDC method of valuistic formuology) More Warne ? More $$$ outlay. Always. Yes, but the Japanese version does have a very wide and rather weird stereo separation -- Art and Warne to the far left, rhythm section to the far right. I need the extra material (though OJC issue doesn't leave out anything great) but wish I'd also kept my copy of "The Way It Was," which if IIRC either used a mono master or tamed the wide stereo spread.

Thanks, Brownie, for mentioning this. I found a copy today of the Japanese RCA LP version of one of the volumes, the one with with "Jordu" on it. Everyone's in fine form, but Jordan is just on fire, both as a soloist and as a comper, and KD's solo on "Besame Mucho" is one of his very best.

Pepper/Marsh "All The Things" available less expensively (and can be listened to) here: http://www.amazon.com/Way-Was-Art-Pepper/dp/B000000YLN Their solos are great. but the exchanges between them toward the end of the track are from another planet.

Art Pepper and Warne Marsh on "All The Things You Are": http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/...Warne+Marsh.htm

Further details about S.'s view of the first Boulez Rite recording, from "Dialogues": "Augurs of Spring" --"this is much too fast, as well as ragged"; "Spring Rounds -- "The ritardandos before 49 and 57 are ugly solecisms"; "The Sage" -- This is more than twice too fast"; [The performance overall "is less good than I had hoped.... Apart from sloppinesses -- surprising but of no importance -- there are very bad tempi and some tasteless alterations.... None of the three performances [Karajan's, Boulez's, and one with the Moscow State Symphony, conducted by a guy whose name I can't transliterate] is good enough to be preserved." I was impressed by Craft's Rite on MusicMasters with the Orchestra of St. Lukes. I believe he recorded it again a few years later for Koch with the New Philharmonia.

In one of the Stravinsky-Craft conversation books, there are some fairly scathing (at times) remarks about this recording from S. (purportedly), though it is preferred to the recording it is being compared to, Karajan's.

Farlow's music I've known and loved for years. There's one date on the set that's kind of tepid -- the one with West Coast hornmen; nothing against them, but something was a bit off that day --otherwise it's all top drawer. The Smith set was a revelation to me; all I knew was his famous early "Moonlight in Vermont" album and one other later quartet date. It's hard to find the right words, but Smith in his highly polished, alwys unruffled, technically awesome (and some of his techniques are his alone) way is also one of the strangest, almost surreal, jazz musicians I know. I think it was Jim Sangrey who said in passing not long ago that Smith might be thought of as coming from a C&W sensibility, and he did play in such bands as a kid, but to the degree that that's there (the virtuoso guitar picker side of that scene), it gets blended with a unique, high-powered harmonic imagination -- perhaps a la virtuoso cocktail pianist Cy Walter, the so-called Park Avenue Tatum. Can't quite put this sketch of Smith together -- forgive me -- but there are lots of times on these sides where he does something, and you say, "What the hell was THAT!" Yes, you could say it's just really slick, but I'd say that while it's really slick, there's also a lot of real musical thought involved, and fairly unique, intense thinking too. I like Joe Pass on that Gerald Wilson big band date he did. Otherwise, he mostly bores me. A guitar navel-gazer.

The whole interview is fascinating -- don't just stop at the Lee Morgan part.

Just found copies of these, which all seem to be still available in one way or another: 1) Mingus Big Band, "Live in Time" (Dreyfus): Never paid much attention to the MBB, partly because ghost bands usually creep me out, partly because some of Sue Mingus's behavior creeps me out. Well, this 2-CD live set from 1996 is terrific --- a real band full of real players (Gary Bartz, Steve Slagle, Randy Brecker, Ronnie Cuber or Gary Smulyan, John Hicks or Kenny Drew Jr., lead trumpeter Earl Gardner [!], John Stubblefield, etc). And fine work from arranger Sy Johnson, who knows his Mingus (and who of course knew Mingus). Not just the old favorites either -- there's a hellacious "Number 29," "Children's Hour of Dream" from "Epitaph," "Chair in the Sky," etc. Well-recorded too. 2) Ralph Peterson Trio with Geri Allen, "Triangular" (Blue Note): Some of the best/hottest Allen I've heard -- with Essiet Essiet and, on one track, Phil Bowler on bass -- and as fine a recording as I've ever heard of a piano trio, courtesy of Jim Anderson. Exceptional space, clarity, overall realism. I have it on LP -- rec. 1989. 3) Renee Rosnes, "For the Moment" (Blue Note): Also recorded by Anderson, in 1990, and, like the Peterson, produced by the Japanese label Something Else, apparaently in collaboration with Blue Note. Lineup is Joe Henderson (Rosnes's former boss), Steve Wilson, Ira Coleman, and Billy Drummond (Rosnes's spouse). I usually have mixed feelings about these two horn players, but they're in fine, focused form (Anderson does a superb job of capturing Henderson's sound -- not an easy thing to do, I'd bet); Rosnes perhaps sounds more individual at this fairly early stage than she would later on; and the way the horns play the tunes ("Friday the Thirteenth," originals by Woody Shaw and Walt Weiskopf, four by Rosnes, and "Summer Night") speaks of a good deal of well-spent rehearsal time. A gem. CD, rec. 1990.