Larry Kart

I agree that lateish Al was almost uniformily superb -- got to hear him pretty much every year at the Jazz Showcase in the '80s (until his death), paired with Zoot, Lee Konitz, Allen Eager, Clark Terry or on his own -- but one middle period Al Cohn disc that should not be missed is the one he did for Coral with Bob Brookmeyer that Verve put out a year or so ago. Backed by Mose Allison, Teddy Kotick, and Nick Stabulus (in a neo-Blakey groove), both horn soloists are in great form. Some nice discreet writing -- charts and originals -- too. I'm especially knocked out by the performance here of "A Blues Serenade." A lovely day in the studio. Only possible drawback is 12 shortish tracks (maybe nothing as long as 4 minutes), but on the other hand, the need to get it said within those frameworks seems to stimulate everyone. I've loved this album since it came out in 1957 or so. Grab it before it's gone, if it isn't already.

You're right, there. I'm told you can get it elsewhere for about $10-$12. But I like your title better than mine.

Hey, wise guy -- Jack Nimitz was/is a good, distinctive player.

I'm there. What a strange album this might be. I'm reminded of a non-existent album that I "listened to" in a dream as an adolescent -- the frontline consisted of Jack Teagarden and Paul Desmond, with the former stating and embelishing the melodies of standards (e.g. "Stars Fell on Alabama") in relatively slow motion, while the latter circled around him.

Maybe I've just been lucky, but so far everything I've bought from Caiman (through Amazon) has arrived as quickly and cleanly as anything ever does. On the other hand, most of what I've bought from Caiman happens to have been Lone Hill type stuff; perhaps it's like buying stolen goods from an outfit that steals from thieves.

King U -- What I wrote above was "the band in general, with the exception of Land, is in fairly tepid form..." That is, Land IMO is in very good form on "More Live at the Beehive," while the rest of the band is not.

Broke down and bought "More Live from the Beehive." Have to say that the band in general, with the exception of Land, is in fairly tepid form; Brown (by his own high standard) sounds about as untogether (not technicially but in terms of coherent, long-lined thinking) as I can remember ever hearing, and Roach seems similarly disengaged. I get the feeling of the last set on the the last night of the gig, with few people in the club and the band thinking about leaving town. Completists will want it, but IMO this is miles below the level of the Nov. 7 Beehive material, though admittedly that may have been as hot a night as any band ever had. Perhaps this is God's revenge upon those who succumb to the Lone Hill impulse.

Yes, on both counts.

Anita Gravine, NYC-based. Her album of Burke-Van Huesen songs from the "Road" pictures, "Welcome to My Dream" (with Mike Abene charts), is to die for. I should know; I wrote the notes, and it killed me. Some excellent playing from Gary Burton on the album as well. Anita really swings, without any hip chick mannerisms, and she has a gorgeous contralto-ish voice.

From a June 2003 Village Voice story on Russell: "Russell was stung when Jazz at Lincoln Center canceled plans for a 70th birthday concert because he uses electric bass. Understandable maybe in 1952, but in 1992?"

Leaving aside the question of how big Joe Z's ego is, the going off on Wynton thing probably had more to do with J@LC's longstanding but recently abrogated (or temporized) ban against booking any group that used electronic instruments. This came into play most notably when a George Russell Orchestra concert at J@LC was cancelled after management (read Wynton) learned that Russell's outfit included an electronic bassist. Wynton looking down his nose at/pulling rank on George Russell -- Jeez!

Why the hell do we suddenly have a new actor playing Octavian? The first Octavian was perfect, and this guy is a stick. I'd have no problem with an Octavian who looked a bit young for what he's up to; in fact, that would be all for the better; it was part of the charm of the first Octavian's performance. Damn it!

There's a lot to like about "Focus," but at times Stan gets into that "moo-ing" bag he was prey to at that time, which (though it may be more my problem), drives me crazy. BTW, if you want to witness the often brilliant British critic Max Harrison go batshit in plain sight, check out his entry on "Focus" in "The Essential Jazz Records, Vol. 2." The entry itself is quite good, but at one point Max homes in on Martin Williams' old review of "Focus" (reprintd in Martin's "Jazz Heritage") in which MW refers to Eddie Sauter's string writing as "derivative of Bartok." Now MW's "derivative" is bit snarky; "inspired by" would be better, but an enraged Max proceeds to say "that there is no stylistic resemblance [between Sauter's writing and Bartok's] at all," which is nuts -- and Max then adds in a sneering footnote: "Bartok's influence here is like Milhaud's on Brubeck in that it can be herad by those who do not know the composer's work yet not by those who do." Only problem is that "I'm Late, "I'm Late" is clearly based on the second movement of Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste -- a fact that is corroborated in the liner notes to the CD reissue of "Focus" by Jacob Glick of the Beaux Arts String Quartet, who played on the "Focus" date. What was Max thinking here?

Oh -- you mean my girls. I'll say hello for you.

I don't know what Allen means there, but it sounds like fun.

Great Lone Hill album title -- "Tony Scott and the Three Dicks." That would be Katz, Garcia, and Hyman. Something else I owe to the Lone Hill family -- the four tracks with Harry Edison, Sonny Criss, Jimmy Rowles, John Simmons, and Buddy Rich that they've added to their pirating of the Verve "Buddy And Sweets" album (with the same lineup, plus Barney Kessel and minus Criss). The Edison-Criss date (I shamefully admit) is very good.

An '80s reissue of one of the earlier Parker novels has an intro by a writer who once was an imprisoned bank robber. He says that Parker novels were very popular in prison. Was it Albert Nussbaum? Do you remember which Parker book it was? Nussbaum also interviewd George Burns for us via the US Post Office. I'm virtually certain it was Nussbaum. Don't recall which Parker it was, but it was one of a series of '70s or '80s hardback reissues of the early set of Parkers, put out by a mystery/crime specialty imprint like Otto Penzler. All of them had intros by Westlake friends and admirers -- Lawrence Bloch, Brian Garfield, etc. BTW, the depressed ex-cop of the Westlake/ "Tucker Coe" books is Mitch Tobin.

An '80s reissue of one of the earlier Parker novels has an intro by a writer who once was an imprisoned bank robber. He says that Parker novels were very popular in prison.

My gut feeling is that Manning had problems with the rain but made a reasonable adjustment because he and the Colts had to, given the nature of their offense, but that the Bears' offensive brain trust, given the weather and the fact that they had the lead for a good while in the first half, decided to put the training wheels back on Grossman, which was a big mistake in at least two ways -- it robbed their offense, and Grossman in particular, of any semblance of variety and aggressiveness and left the Bears defense on the field to get worn down and figured out. And once the Bears de-balled their offense by pretty much taking away the possibility that they might pass, they could never get it or Grossman back in gear again. Of course, maybe this was a night when Rex was never going to get in gear no matter what and/or the Colts were just the better team, but even so, I think that Ron Turner coughed up a hairball. On the other hand, offensive co-ordinator is a very difficult stressful occupation. Another little thing that bugged the hell out of me --that play in the first half, after the Colt's first squib kickoff, when the Bears put Hester for the next kickoff at about the 30-yard-line and had Rashid Davis deep. Way too cute and nervous, and it sure didn't work. That felt to me like a significant momentum-changer.

Will Blades is the son of an old friend of mine, John Blades, for many years a top-notch features writer for the Chicago Tribune (now happily retired) and author of a very strange and funny novel, "Small Game."

IIRC in one of Westlake's Richard Stark novels -- I think it was "The Score," where Parker and colleagues try to knock over an entire town in Wyoming -- a member of the criminal crew is a jazz fan who says a few things about the music early on that subtly and accurately place him. Again IIRC, he's a guy who's too edgy and talks too much, and his unnecessary interjection of whose music he likes to listen to is a sign of this flaw, if only because we know that no one else in the crew gives a damn about this. It's not that he's a snob; rather (to over-interpret a bit), he's a middle-aged guy whose favorite music is no longer in favor as much as it used to be, and this dovetails neatly with his own sense that life has unfairly passed him by, which leaves him perpetually pissed him off and thus potentially unstable. Yeah, I think he was talking about a JATP recording from the late '40s in a novel that takes place in the mid '60s.

Definitely poetic, at its best, but there's also a repetitiveness in that realm with RM that can make things a bit unreal at times if you think about it too much. You want to say to Lew Archer, "Don't you remember the shape of your last three cases? Everything goes back to Windsor, Ontario, or to what someone did in the Navy in WWII, or both." Also, I get the feeling that Kenneth Millar (i.e. RM) spent a fair amount of time on the couch; some of his themes, potent though they are, feel like they've been transferred too neatly from the analyst's office to the page. On the other hand, RM at his best is superb. I'm especially fond of "The Zebra-Striped Hearse" (the revelation of the key clue/piece of evidence in that one is a real "whoosh") and others of that era.

I don't deny Westlake's expertise when he writes under his own name; I just don't care for clever/wry, and in some cases outright comic, crime fiction. In the same way, I like Lawrence Bloch's Matt Scudder novels but don't have a taste for Bloch's clever/wry books about burglar Bernie Rhodenbahr. BTW, Westlake under another of his pseudonyms (abandoned since the mid-1970s) Tucker Coe, wrote very well in yet a third way about a deeply depressed (with good reason) ex-cop, Mitch ... somebody. Mitch was almost as tough as Parker (and/or he lived in a world that was almost as tough as Parker's), but the Coe novels are largely free from on-the-page violence, and Mitch tends to think things out in a near-Nero Wolfe manner. Haven't read all the Tucker Coes -- I believe there are five of them -- but I assume that at the end of the final one, Mitch more or less rejoins the human race, thus resolving the theme or preoccupation that led Westlake to create him. Also BTW, one strange thing about the Richard Stark-Parker novels is that Westlake wrote a whole bunch of them from the early '60s to I think the early '70s, and then stopped, only to return to Stark-Parker in the late '90s. About a 20-year gap. And the late Stark-Parkers are very good -- the later Parker being a logical continuation (in character and life circumstances) of the man of the early Stark-Parker books, though if you went back and tried to figure out how old Parker would have to be by now (he's said to have been a young WWII vet in one of the early books), the present-day Parker wouldn't make sense age-wise. Also, in the later Parkers especially, Westlake sets himself some plot puzzles that are quite bizarre if you step back from them a bit, though they feel perfectly natural and necessary in the reading and are resolved in the same manner. You could say that the "poetry" of the Stark-Parker novels is in the plotting -- i.e. the rhythms of what happens next -- which is a really unusual thing in modern fiction of any sort, at least in my experience. About those plot rhythms -- Westlake/Stark makes an interesting contrast with Michael Connelly, who is also a "'poetry' is in the plot" writer. In a Connelly/Harry Bosch novel, typically you feel about 60 or 80 pages from the end that the plot is just about wound up, but it certainly is not -- and that is where and how a lot of the poetic "whoosh" hits you (by "poetic" I mean that there's a sense here that a lyrical vision or image of the world is being conveyed to us by this plot shape, one that is beyond our ability, and that of the characters', to grasp rationally). In a Stark/Parker novel, typically you feel about 6 or 8 pages (!) from the end that the plot can't possibly be that close to being wound up, but it is. And that where and how a lot of the poetic "whoosh" hits you etc.

At least two of Westlake's screenplay credits are pretty impressive: The Grifters (1990) The Stepfather (1987) (screenplay) (story) And several notable movies (with screenplays by others) are based on books that Westlake wrote under his own name or under one of his several pseudonyms, Richard Stark: The Outfit (1973) (as Richard Stark) The Hot Rock (1972) Point Blank (1967) (novel The Hunter) (as Richard Stark) Made in U.S.A. (1966) (novel The Jugger) (as Richard Stark) That's right, the Godard "Made in U.S.A." BTW, the Stark novels, all about a career criminal named Parker, may be the best hardboiled crime fiction there is. To relieve possible bewilderment, in Godard's "Made In U.S.A.," the Parker character is played by Anna Karina. Robert Duvall in "The Outfit" is a bit more like what one imagines Parker to be. Lee Marvin is great in "Point Blank," but he's angry to the point of being nuts as he seeks revenge, which makes for a great movie but is not true to Westlake-Stark's book. Parker seldom if ever gets angry, and when he does, he knows he's made a mistake; in one sense, he just a problem solver.

At least two of Westlake's screenplay credits are pretty impressive: The Grifters (1990) The Stepfather (1987) (screenplay) (story) And several notable movies (with screenplays by others) are based on books that Westlake wrote under his own name or under one of his several pseudonyms, Richard Stark: The Outfit (1973) (as Richard Stark) The Hot Rock (1972) Point Blank (1967) (novel The Hunter) (as Richard Stark) Made in U.S.A. (1966) (novel The Jugger) (as Richard Stark) That's right, the Godard "Made in U.S.A." BTW, the Stark novels, all about a career criminal named Parker, may be the best hardboiled crime fiction there is.