Larry Kart

Funny -- when I was in sixth grade or so I tried to check out a Philip Wylie book from the public library -- maybe that one, maybe a novel of his that seemed to have a science fiction flavor (I dug SF then, or what SF was then) -- and the kind librarian, whom I knew quite well, didn't let me do it, saying that it was an "adult" book, with a special and new-to-me emphasis. So instead I looked on the new books shelf and checked out Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," which I liked a lot (though no doubt I didn't fully understand it then). I think I came out ahead in that exchange. BTW, Ellison was a visiting professer when I was a second-year college student and lived in our dorm. At a casual roundtable one night, he was talking about/being quizzed about "Invisible Man" and made a point that he'd made or would make elsewhere -- that whatever else the book was, he intended that much of it be very funny. I was able to then truthfully say that that's the way many scenes (e.g. the paint factory scene) hit me at age 12 or 13, which I think he beleived and was glad to hear. Also, a friend of mine during that time was walking to class one day with Ellison, discussing something or other, when my friend, suddenly realizing he was late, said goodbye and left the sidewalk to head diagonally for his destination. Ellison grabbed his arm and said quite firmly, "Don't walk on the grass." My friend was kind of astonished at the time -- thinking, he said to me when he told what had happened, that Ellison had to be a rebel at heart who certainly wouldn't care about whether someone stayed on the sidewalk and similar "minor" social rules -- but when he thought about it a bit, he realized that Ellison was, in this regard at least, not at all who my friend thought he was. Hugh Kenner? A smart guy for sure, and a great source of enlightenment up to a point, but talk about gaping partialities and limitations!

There's some fascinating information about Williams, which pretty much dovetails with what I knew and felt about the the man, in John Gennari's "Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz And Its Critics" (U. of Chicago Press), an otherwise deeply flawed, if not flat-out reprehenensible book IMO (I've gone into that at length on other threads). In any case, almost all of Gennari's information about Williams is taken (with acknowledgement) from unpublished interviews done with Williams by a scholar named Bryant Dupre. About Martin "not being that bright," I wouldn't say that at all. He certainly was no middlebrow -- Whitney Balliett among jazz writers of note might define the top end of the middlebrow crowd, with Leonard Feather and maybe Gene Lees resting at or near the bottom -- although you could fairly say that Martin's highbrowness was more or less willed. That is, he had a more or less positive and somewhat acquired vision of what highbrow behavior was and what highbrow attititudes were (though this vision also was quite personal, shrewd, and critical for the most part), and he tried to bring that behavior and those attitudes to bear on jazz criticism. You could argue that there was some status-mongering involved here, but nobody's perfect. Also, while Chuck is right about Martin's blindspot about humor in jazz, and almost any trace of showbiz as well, the breadth and accuracy of his taste (positive and negative) was almost with parallel among jazz writers during what might be called his on-the-firing-line years. Without doubt Martin was not that "hip," but 1) he certainly didn't want to be in a good many (though perhaps not all) of the interlocking senses of that term 2) I'm not aware that he presumed to be hip, in part because 3), as I'm sure he knew, given the rest of who he was, a would-be hip Martin W. would have been absurd. One more thing about the height of Martin's brow: He wrote a whole lot of things about American popular art and its place and value in the scheme of things that were sound and novel and still are important. He had a strain of willed elitisim in him, but other deep, wise, even loving strains as well. I wish he were still around to argue with.

That Louise Brooks is terrific.

Some of the accompaniments are Hal Mooney-icky, but I've never heard better Vaughan than the best stuff on the 2-LP (later 2-CD) set "Great Songs From Hit Shows." (Disclaimer: I wrote the notes for the CD reissue.)

Maybe I haven't followed it closely enough. Is every critic who gave Hatto a favorable review now behaving this way? Or is the anger against a particular set of critics who are refusing to eat humble pie? Or were there only those few to begin with? The Gramophone put out Barrington-Coupe's version which significantly softens the reality. They were pushing Hatto even when the doubts were in full flow, and one of their reviewers Jeremy Nicholas published a letter saying that anyone with doubts must supply evidence that would 'stand up in a court of law' that the recordings were not genuine, or keep quiet. To me that is fatuous bluster, where the intelligent and honest thing to do would have been to take the reservations seriously. Personally I never for one moment believed in the things that Nicholas and his ilk were saying (greatest recorded legacy since Richter etc) and found it bizarre that inconsistencies noticeable to the naked ear (as reported by others - I never got pulled in) were just brushed off by 'experts' (Nicholas, Jed Distler, Bryce Morrison). The Gramophone's ringing endorsement of Hatto supplied the copy text for all the obituaries (Nicholas spewed it all out again in The Guardian, Bryce Morrison in Gramophone, ). These guys should fall on their swords but are out in force defending their gullibility. IMO they should apologise and then vanish. I'll add that the claim that these records are great has been often repeated to defend the offending critics, but in fact few have heard them (except for the famous concerto recordings by Ashkenazy, Bronfman et al) so it is not at all clear that these really are great recordings. In any case the critics defence has been that they were picked for their anonymity - hardly a sign of greatness. I also wonder how many of these recordings the admiring critics ever actually heard, and ever possessed in other than CD-R or white label form. They have repeated that there are 120 CDs in this 'great legacy' but have they actually worked through them all? I suggest not. I'll stop now, except to say that my attempt to add a very mildly worded query about the role of critics in the Hatto fiasco to the Gramophone website was censored. That is why I am not impressed by their continued manipulation of the news. What David said.

You don't want to know.

One toke over the line. Howard has that effect on me.

She had better time than a whole lot of jazz instrumentalists. Sounds like it might be Stan Levey on drums. Met Lee backstage once, after a top-notch performance in the early 1980s. Seemed like the closer you got to her, the more indistinct her features became.

Some fresh stupidity on the subject from The Third Reich (comments follow): Reviewers not to blame for Hatto fraud By Howard Reich Tribune arts critic Published March 4, 2007 So the critics allegedly blew it. They raved about classical recordings released under the name of pianist Joyce Hatto, and it turns out the CDs weren't by Hatto at all: Her husband had borrowed recordings by some truly celebrated artists -- such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Yefim Bronfman and Minoru Nojima -- and passed them off as Hatto's. The reviewers, it seems, were stunned by the prowess of these releases. "Even in the most daunting repertoire, her poise in the face of one pianistic storm after another is a source of astonishment," wrote Bryce Morrison in Gramophone. "Joyce Hatto must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of," enthused critic Richard Dyer in the Boston Globe. "Her legacy is a discography that in quantity, musical range and consistent quality has been equaled by few pianists in history," observed critic Jeremy Nicholas in an obituary of Hatto last July, in London's Guardian. Last month, when recording engineer Andrew Rose proved -- by comparing sound wave patterns -- that Hatto's releases actually had been pilfered from the work of many other pianists, some observers began chortling. "Quite a few critics fell for the discography of the late British pianist Joyce Hatto," wrote Tim Smith, in the Baltimore Sun. "They have probably been trying to wipe the egg from their faces since the news broke a couple of weeks ago that the recordings are a giant fraud." How absurd. The critics who applauded Hatto's alleged recordings indeed were recognizing great performances by estimable artists. They were doing, in fact, precisely what critics are supposed to do: discern artistic excellence. That Hatto's husband and record producer, William Barrington-Coupe, committed fraud by proffering the artistic achievements of other pianists as his wife's work does nothing to diminish the value of the original recordings themselves, nor the critics' assessments of them. Furthermore, no human pair of ears -- no matter how adept -- possibly could be expected to identify in Hatto's 100-plus releases the plagiarized and often technologically manipulated recordings of uncounted other pianists (to date, no one but Barrington-Coupe himself knows how many sources he raided to bolster his wife's reputation). The egg lies not on the faces of the critics but, rather, on the character of Barrington-Coupe. That's not to say, however, that critics are beyond reproach. If any writers reviewed the same recordings differently, depending on whether Hatto's name or someone else's was on the label, they clearly have some explaining to do. Certainly such errors of analysis, and worse, have been committed in the name of music criticism. Consider a case that unfolded locally in 1990, when a Chicago critic went to review a performance by Andre Watts at the Ravinia Festival, in Highland Park. The critic wrote that the concert proved Watts was "beyond the shadow of a doubt, the greatest living pianist in the concert arena." Alas, Watts never took the stage -- he canceled, with pianist Ju Hee Suh taking his place. "I arrived late and had not been informed of the change," he told the Tribune at the time. "I couldn't see the stage." Nor hear it, apparently. That has not happened in Hatto's case -- at least not yet. Comments: The critics are responsible, in most cases, for being strongly influenced in their judgments by Barrington-Coupe's (the husband's) carefully crafted, multi-faceted, and mostly or entirely faked-up human interest story, whose components were 1) forgotten and/or little-known, unfairly neglected genius 2) terribly-ill-for-many-years genius 3) and, in the case of the Brit crits who fell earliest and hardest for the fraud, forgotten and/or little-known, unfairly neglected, terribly-ill-for-many-years Brit genius. The critics, in most cases, are also responsible for not questioning the obvious anomalies in the Hatto story (more than a 100 recordings, of virtuoso repertory in many cases, allegedly recorded in a short span of time by a woman who was that ill; the pseudonymous, previously unheard of even in the realm of pseudonyms, orchestras; the conducter no one had ever heard of, etc.). Also most/many of the critics (certainly any who listened to more than a few "Hatto" recordings) are responsible for not detecting, however good any of the pirated and manipulated recordings might be, how wildly different in style the body of "Hatto's" recorded work was -- well beyond the boundaries of any previously known stylistically flexible pianist of any talent. And then there is the special category of critics who praised "Hatto's" recording of Work X after dismissing in a previous review the recording of that work that "Hatto's" recording was pirated from. No responsibility there.

I think he was referring to Monica Crowley. Crowley was who I was thinking of.

But "to put this issue ... onto the table and look at it in a serious way," given your accurate description of the position and motives of the "other side," is to more or less grant upfront the "sideness" (so to speak) of that side -- which is exactly the move these "move-the-goal posts" bastards want us to make. They're essentially engaged in a power/propaganda operation that they wish to/need to disguise from time to time as rational discourse. To sit down with them and talk "in a serious way" about any of this just makes it easier for them to engage in their next act of useful (to them) table-pounding slander; after all, they can point to the "serious" discussion you-all had as proof that they're willing to talk that way and thus must be taken seriously across the board. It's like having a serious discussion with Karl Rove or the late Lee Atwater.

A 1998 post from a classical board: "Apparently, Ligeti and Salonen had a major clash during the recording of Le Grand Macabre. At one point, Salonen even asked Ligeti to leave the hall while he was rehearsing with the singers. Conductor and composer are currently no more speaking to each other."

More writings from me? Maybe some time. I'm thinking of something down the road that will center around jazz but will be more anecdotal/personal -- sometimes amusing and I hope revealing incidents in which I was a witness/participant to the ways in which the music and the individual human beings who make it and listen to it bump into each other. In a few cases, celebrated figures (e.g. Coleman Hawkins, Thad Jones -- hey, perhaps even Stanley Crouch in a supporting role) are involved, but in most cases, not. There might be some fictionalization but only to disguise identities a bit -- I don't want to embarrass anyone. On the other hand, a deceased friend who was a great novelist IMO once told me -- when we were talking about how novelist Gilbert Sorrentino (a onetime friend-mentor of his) had created in his brilliant "Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things" quite recognizable acid portraits of his former close acquaintances in NY bohemian literary circles of the l950s and early '60s -- that the quality of the work outweighs any moral questions of how one treats real people in print, especially of course in fiction. I'm not sure I agree.

Larry Goldings? Keep us posted on when the sideman dates come out.

Oh, yeah -- she also said she was "tough" on Nixon at times, called him out when he indulged in bouts of ratf*** behavior. But she sat on his lap.

For some reason I'm reminded of that young not unintelligent female aide to Dick Nixon in his post-presidential years (at the Nixon Library in California) who helped Nixon out on the various books he wrote, swore that if you really knew him he proved to be a sweet, kind man and even went so far (in bouts of tenderness and empathy on her part) as to sit on his f****** lap.

Tjader B. -- I'm with you on the cross pollination, but while Pres certainly was influenced by Trumbauer (and acknowledged the influence) he specifically denied, in his late-'50s Jazz Hot interview, that he had been influenced by Bud. That doesn't prove that he wasn't, just that he said he wasn't. Also, as more than one person has pointed out before, if Pres dug Tram, he almost certainly had to be picking up on what Bix was playing alongside Tram on "Singing the Blues" et al.

P.S. Phil -- What have you been up to/how have things been going musically?

Oh, no -- you're not going to blame me for that.

In its own "quiet" way, almost as good as "This Is Spinal Tap."

Not ready to swear it's my favorite, but I loved it the first time I heard it and every time since; never loses its freshness. The Prestige "Blue Monk" is damn good too. And "These Foolish Things" is just nutty -- what a great choice of tempo.

Yes, up to a point, though your "as is any pop record" is both an exaggeration, I think, and an apples/oranges thing -- the goal/model for post-production manipulation in the classical world pretty much remains the "image," or an image, of what the piece would have/might have sounded like in a concert hall. That is seldom if ever the case in the pop world any more AFAIK. Moreover, none of this has any relevance I can see to the Hatto hoax, which involved the direct copying of issued recordings of complete works by other pianists, which in most cases were then digitally manipulated (sped up but without altering pitch) in order to disguise their origin and to make the results sound more virtuosic. The husband's claim that all this copying began because he wanted/needed to edit out from otherwise topnotch Hatto recorded performances his sick wife's coughs and cries of pain and then thought of Schwarzkopf dubbing in a high note for Flagsted in Furtwangler's recording of "Tristan" recording is absurd.

The Gramophone trumpets the supposed confession of Hatto's husband here: http://www.gramophone.co.uk/newsMainTempla...newssectionID=1 but anyone with a brain can see that much of what the man says here has to be a skein of new self-serving, sympathy-begging fabulations. No doubt, he'll keep spinning things along in this manner until he ends up in court, if that should ever happen. Probably the whole "I did it to make my sick wife feel better" line is designed to fend off John Law.

This set really took me back to my youth -- some of these were among the first jazz LPs I heard. IIRC there's a moment on Jam Session 5 or 6 where Jacquet, backed some riffing from the other horns, kind of does an imitation of a four-engine propeller aircraft buzzing past, a doppler effect thing. Whatever, that moment utterly transfixed me back then -- more like an isolated "cool" bit on a pop record would have, but that's the way it goes (or went). I played it over and over.