Larry Kart

Adrian Lyne George Strait Jake Gyllenhaal

I saw Neal Cassady from across a moderately crowded room.

You know about the cat that ate some cheese and then waited at the mouse hole with baited breath. For future reference, it's "bated breath" (i.e. "restrain one's breathing through anxiety or suspense"). Also see the word "abate" -- "lessen or diminish."

Not "well done" according to a number of people who have extensive prior knowwledge of the subject -- Dan Morgenstern of The Institute of Jazz Studies, for one, John Litweiler, for another. A very good recent book on Morton is Phil Pastras's "Dead Man Blues: Jelly Roll Morton Way Out West" (U. of California Press, 2001), which focuses on the two periods (1917-22 and 1940-1) that Morton spent on the West Coast.

My intro to JB was "The T.A.M.I. Show," which I saw when it came out in a funky NYC theater where the audience was split -- both in terms of numbers and where people sat -- right down the middle. As I recall, JB in great form was the film's penultimate act, followed by The Rolling Stones. The perceived indignity of this on the part of one half of the crowd was such that bottles were hurled at and punctured the screen, and the film, I think, was halted before the Stones' portion was over. Don't know whether further uproar followed; I left at that point.

Wow -- you do have your sources.

Clem -- I know what you mean about Clark Terry, but there are exceptions: "Swahili" (EmArcy), from 1955, with Quincy Jones charts (they can be cute, I know), Jimmy Cleveland, Cecil Payne, Horace Silver, Oscar Pettiford, and Art Blakey (that rhythm section makes a big difference); and "In Orbit" with Monk. Terry used to come through town pretty often at the Jazz Showcase, and I'd usually express some annoyance in print at what seemed to me to be his complacent cliche-mongering (one time, later in the week, he went on the air with a local DJ-Black activist and agreed with him that I had to be racist). Then the next year he was paired at the Showcase with Al Cohn, who was in the take-no-prisoners mode of his later years, and Clark got the message right off and really played.

I reviewed "Miles In the Sky" for Down Beat when it came out (****1/2, as I recall).

OK, but why should I let the bad behavior of the (too) many make me not look for or feel strains of genuine familial life? If I can tell the difference between the real thing and the fake, isn't shunning all familial coherence because some of what's on the market under that name is fake, even nasty fake, like letting the bastards win far more comprehensively than they ever dreamed of?

I know (or think I know) what you're saying here, but let's not forget (per FWIW the argument/account I strung together in the introductory chapter of my book) that fairly early on jazz did develop a collective sense of "self" -- that is, "an identity of which it was conscious and that shaped its sense of what it could and should do next" -- and that this sense of identity, while neither unthreatened nor perhap an unmixed blessing, did for the most part have a very stimulating effect on the music. Lord knows I don't have anything Marsalis-ian mind here -- some status-mongering, "Jazz is America's classical music, so where's my damn subsidy/concert hall" kind of thing -- but that sense of jazz's identity, however loose-woven it might have been at times, was not just some cockamamie "construct," let alone an ideology, but the recognition of a spontaneously arising social-aesthetic fact that was quite evident to a whole lot of people. That identity may or may not have crumbled or be crumbling, but while there's certainly nothing wrong in liking any music that pleases you, I wouldn't be so quick to sing the praises of sheer porousness -- as though the presence of stupid, or self-serving, or self-righteousness stylistic rule-makers meant in turn that in no music of definite strength and integrity could that strength and integrity be to some significant degree the result of a semi-familial, self-reflective recognition of the kind of thing it is. There's both life and logic in that, I think.

Don't know those two, though I've liked what I've heard of LeDonne. You might be amused by this YouTube clip (it's the first one): http://www.youtube.com/results?search_quer...p;search=Search which shows a very young LeDonne on "Perdido" with Panama Francis and the Savoy Sultans. Interesting tenor solo there from George Kelly, who definitely had his own thing.

Francis the Talking Mule Frankie Laine Buck Clayton

Man Mountain Dean Thomas Mann Magic Johnson

Little Lulu Louise Brooks Alban Berg

Lennie Dykstra Tallulah Bankhead Harrison Bankhead

Ward Cleaver Meckie Messer Lotte Lenya

Jim Belushi John Belushi Bob Woodward

Checking around, it seems like what I might have heard is a track from Sanborn's "Pearls," which is all or mostly standards (but "Laura"-less).

Again, my experience is limited and random, if only because I only listen to things that I decide upfront are going to be worth paying attention to (sometimes I'm disappointed, of course) or to things that just happen to be around and grab my attention. In the latter vein, I've heard in particular a fair amount of Sanborn over the years, just because that's almost unavoidable, and once on the radio there cropped up a Sanborn version of some standard I think -- maybe "Laura"? -- that seemed a quantum jump beyond what I was used to hearing from him, not at all in style but in the realm of conviction/intensity. I would hunt down and buy that track if I could -- not only to dig it but also to think about how and why it's different, if in fact it was.

I'm pretty much of an outsider when it comes to this particular aspect of this whole big topic, but I ask in all innocence about "If you really want/need to play instrumental popjazz..." -- "need" I think I get, but give me a recent notable example of "want" in this realm? And how do you yourself make that distinction between "need" and "want" here and/or assume that other music-makers are making it? Not sure what you mean by notable example, Larry. Gerald Albright? Someone who CAN play his guts out but doesn't. He's making a choice but I don't know what his motivations are. MG What I mean, I guess, is someone who in some respect CAN play -- as you say Albright can -- who gives us some instrumental popjazz (and I assume that would mean some instrumental popjazz that is in fact fairly popular) because, as Jim put it, he really wants/needs to. To my mind, this suggests that Jim (and perhaps others) might be making a distinction between really "need" and really "want" here? If so, I think I want to know more about that.

I'm pretty much of an outsider when it comes to this particular aspect of this whole big topic, but I ask in all innocence about "If you really want/need to play instrumental popjazz..." -- "need" I think I get, but give me a recent notable example of "want" in this realm? And how do you yourself make that distinction between "need" and "want" here and/or assume that other music-makers are making it?

A tasty drummer. Not too fond of his saxophonist brother, though.

Interesting point. When and if you feel like it, please amplify.