Larry Kart

Yes, Clem, I did see the Alan Watkins un-masking. In some ways, this is even weirder than the Hatto thing, because the Hatto thing is probably in part a cold-blooded con for gain, in part (at least after a while) sheer madness, while the Watkins thing is so fusty/amiable Brit in tone yet no less elaborate and effortful and loony than the whole Hatto thing. I guess, it's all a living lesson in how flaming nuts seemingly ordinary people can be.

Listen again to the Marsh-Konitiz album you already have; it's a great one. If you don't like Konitz on there, then he's probably not going to be to your taste in any of his incarnations.

GM looks like Hugh Hefner in this pic. Eerie bordering on the uncanny -- but Sandy Dennis was no Playmate.

That tune almost certainly was "All Across The City," later recorded by Hall with Bill Evans I believe and probably elsewhere. "Two Jims and a Zoot" (A&R man Teddy Charles) is good one -- top-notch Raney and some fine work from the young Steve Swallow.

Gee Larry, I was agreeing with you and then you went into "green magic marker land". What a bunch of crap. Hey, at least the cables I trimmed weren't fancy ones.

The problem I've always found, if "problem" is the way to put it, is that if you're listening to a recorded performance as a performance of some music rather than as a sound test, the ear (within limits) usually adjusts, and you find yourself pretty much listening to the same thing you thought you were listening to before and in the same way -- "before" being the version or versions prior to the new re-mastered one. I had a recent confirmation of that when I performed a satisfying little "tweak" on my system, trimming the length of my speaker cables until they were a short as could be while leaving the speakers in my preferred position. The gain in sound quality was obvious (tighter bass, better imaging. etc.), and I thought "Oh boy -- everything I have is going to sound new again." But that feeling went away after a day or two; also, most of the first day was spend in ansty "sound" listening, not listening to music. I'm sure there are a few albums and CDs where the tweak I made will allow me to her something really crucial that I never really made out before, but otherwise, as I said, IMO the ear adjusts.

A frontline of Jack Teagarden and Paul Desmond. I heard them play "Stars Fell On Alabama" once in a dream.

Hatto's husband sure is an inventive s.o.b. I like "Rene kept things to himself."

I'm pretty familiar with Deacon's ravings on Rec.Music.Classical.Recordings, and schadenfreude doesn't begin to describe the pleasure I and others feel about what's happened/is happening to him in the wake of the Hatto hoax. It's so perfect that at first I had half a thought that this whole thing might have been cooked up to entrap that rat bastard. The great thing, as Clem said, is that Deacon's prior words are out there -- effusively praising Hatto; attacking (among other things, Deacon likes to tell Jewish RMCR contributors he doesn't like that they're revealing their "ethnic heritage") those who had any doubts about the provenance of Hatto's work; and of course, again as Clem points out, there are most deliciously his prior harsh assessments, in posts over the years, of the very pianists he went on to praise when their work was issued under Hatto's name. I think at one point he tried to explain this by saying that the various digital manipulations (e.g. speeding things up a bit without changing the pitch) that were used to somewhat disguise the original recordings when they were pirated and put out under Hatto's name amounted to striking improvements.

I should have said "the Hatto craze that preceded the exposure of the Hatto hoax." The hoax in its hardcore sense was at work all along and in the softcore sense as well.

It's a bit more complicated than that. All the records Gramophone reviewers, and others of that ilk, get their hands on are freebies, so that in itself is not a motive to puff this recording over that one. Instead, the Hatto craze that preceded the Hatto hoax was a blend of a bizarre, sentimental human interest story (remember David Helfgott and "Shine"?) about a prolific, gravely-ill little-known and/or forgotten recluse; plus the deeply ingrained chauvanism/little island-boosterism of British classical music journalism; and of course, the clever-creepy fraudulence of whoever was engineering the hoax (Hatto's husband, one assumes). That is, knowing that he could play on the first two factors as givens, the perpetrator picked genuinely quite good recordings to fiddle around with and pirate. It's as though he went to school on the Helfgott affair and realized that the big flaw there was that Helfgott could no longer play very well, if indeed he ever could.

and a lot of high-flown classical reviewers are going to get their asses handed to them: http://www.gramophone.co.uk/newsMainTempla...newssectionID=1

Yes, Van de Leur did play a major role in those Dutch Jazz Orchestra Strayhorn albums, which are excellent. In fact, the way the DJO plays that music shows up almost every American big band I've heard that tries to take on a re-creative role (that is, work in a prior muscial style).

If I were a Strayhorn scholar myself (I'm not), I might have been a bit suspicious of that aspect of Hajdu's bio anyway before I read Van de Leur's book (and I did read Hajdu first), because I recall thinking that Hajdu's approach to the music in general and to the clearly tricky question of attribution seemed rather superficical, if that's the right word. But when I did read Van de Leur, whatever doubts I might have had while I read Hajdu certainly crystallized. On the other hand, Hajdu's focus as I recall was more on Strayhorn the man and his milieu, and my recollection is that he was quite good there.

About Strayhorn: First, we need to straighten out what Duke composed on his own, what Strayhorn composed for the Ellington band on his own (a whole lot more than used to be thought; on this, see Walter van de Leur's authoritative "Something To Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn," not Hajdu's bio, which is however good on the man), and what they did together and how they collaborated (again, see Van de Leur, who makes it very clear that Ellington and Strayhorn's musical habits/fingerprints were quite different). As for Strayhorn's stature on his own, as much as I admire his music, I'll always have a problem with "on his own" because as different as his methods might have been from Duke's, he essentially used Duke's "instrument" (i.e. the Ellington band) and was shaped to a great degree in his musical thinking by its pre-existing, continuing presence.

Here's a link to those Plummer albums: http://db.cadencebuilding.com/searchresult...;offset_count=0

If you have a bad back, like Jim does, it's not too much money. Chronic pain is a bitch, and avoiding more expensive medical treatment, if you can, is a good thing.

Good as Plummer was with Russell, he became an even better and more individual player over the years, based in Indianapolis. Don't know about their currrent availability, but he made two fine CDs with Cincinnati-based drummer Ron Enyard for Cadence and an earlier quite magical one, an LP, with keyboard player Steve Corn. Last I heard, Plummer sadly had his lost teeth and had to stop playing.

Aeron. Worth every penny IMO.

I knew of no alternative.

You've got something precious. I've heard about Gourley's Singer tapes but assumed that after all this time there was primal barrier to their emergence. Singer was a Chicagoan; he and Raney came up on the same scene there (along with Gourley), and those who heard Singer later on in NY (Ira Gitler most notably, also Dan Morgenstern) have told me that Singer was his own man and just amazing. He and his wife committed suicide together, stuck their heads in a gas oven. Sorry about the bluntness of that, but that's the story. Clearly theirs was not a happy family.

I have a good friend who used to be (and I'm sure still is) ga-ga over Nina Simone. To me, she was and is kind of like a humorless Eartha Kitt.

No, it says "Jack Monterose" -- a step in the right direction but not far enough.

And it's Wade Legge on piano, not "Wade Lagge".

Lee's October 1957 quartet album for Norman Granz has been packaged (by an EU outfit by the name of Gambit) with Lee's superb May 1957 quintet album "Very Cool" (with Don Ferrara -- his only substantial outing on record AFAIK -- Sal Mosca, Peter Ind, and Shadow Wilson). "Very Cool" I've known and loved since it first came out, but "Tranquility" (I'm semi-embarrassed to say) was new to me. A beautiful date, with some of the most relaxed, lucid Lee ever. Interesting originals (Lee's "Stephanie," Bauer's "Jonquil") and interpretations (a very down tempo "Sunday," a medium-up "The Nearness of You") as well. BTW, does anyone know who the Jack Fuller is who wrote the liner notes for "Tranquility"? It's a new name to me, and phrase or two gives me the feeling that it's Whitney Balliett writing under a pseudonym. (I do know a Jack Fuller who is interested in jazz -- the former editor of the Chicago Tribune, who wrote a novel about a Coltrane-sh figure -- but that Jack Fuller was in high school in 1957.)