Larry Kart

Oh my god, Paul Gonsalves is sleeping throughout the entire tune!! "Sleeping" is one word for it.

The "WTF" moment is Lee is in the midst of his familar "Everybody hum this note and I'll play something on top it" routine. He's listening for us to sing the note he just gave us. The routine went quite well this time because Preston Bradley Hall in the Cultural Center is a very echo-y, domed ceiling room; also, there were a fair number of musicians and otherwise musically alert people in the audience. Thus Lee's note was reproduced accurately and proceeded to hang in the air with little further effort from us, while Lee played on "Alone Together." In fact, Lee seemed a bit taken aback at first by the cloud of sound we'd created for him. It not unlike Morton Feldman's "Rothko Chapel." Thanks for the pictures, Mark. My wife couldn't be there and got a kick out of them.

Ernie Henry is in good form too. He's on the quintet tracks. It's Frank Foster on tenor, not Griffin, on the septet tracks. Only slight drawback is pianist Joe Knight, who can be a bit obvious as a comper, but again that's slight. The lively rawness of this date is rather un-Riverside-ish, but I see that it was produced by Keepnews AND Bill Grauer, which may account for that. Also, there's a nice, of the period, chart on Gee's original "Gee!" -- airy voicings reminisicent of Quincy Jones when he was still alert and relatively honest musically.

Trobonist Matthew Gee's "Jazz By Gee" turns out to be a very earthy, groovy album, though the leader is not the most subtle or creative soloist imaginable. One of the septet tracks, "Kingston Lounge," has a genuine club session feel to it (listening to it, you begin to feel a bit loaded), and this is among the better early Art Taylor dates I know (when he was still deep into a neo-Blakey bag). To clinch the deal, Wilbur Ware is in fine form on the quintet tracks (John Simmons is on the rest), taking a gorgeous two-chorus solo on "Lover Man."

Think about Stanley or about Duke? And whichever it is (or both), how so?

One of his best, which made good use of his equivocal nature. was the very noir Western "The Violent Men" (1955), with Barbara Stanwyck at her most terrifying (a virtual Lady MacBeth), Edward G. Robinson as her crippled cattle-baron husband (you won't believe what Babs has in store for him), and Brian Keith as Babs' covert sweetie, though he really prefers the younger (and understandably pissed off at Babs) Lita Milan. Dark complex doings here, directed in a masterly manner by Rudolph Mate.

Isn't one of these the same as the Pettiford Vogue release? I only have the other of the Birdlanders discs, but I'm not quite sure if the Vogue covers the second one. These are all Henri Renaud produced NY 1954 sessions, right? Don't know the details about other releases of this material, though I think there have been a few over the years. These are the Renaud produced '54 sessions.

A wonderful homegrown player. Don't know the two newer discs. I agree about the alleged Ornette resemblance being deceiving -- I think McGann esssentially made himself, though bits of Rollins and Jackie McLean must have been present at or near the conception. He feels his way note to note, a la latter-day Konitz.

He sure is.

I like what I've listened from "The Birdlanders Vol 1 and 2." What a joy it is to heard a rhythm section with Oscar Pettiford in it. Jay and Kai both in good form, as are Al Cohn and Tal Farlow. I believe someone already has mentioned Taft Jordan's lovely "Mood Indigo." What a sound he had, not unlike Joe Wilder's but definitely his own. I like the part in the notes where he mentions that Charlie Shaver's nickname for him is "Slick."

Jim -- I only know Riddle's arrangments for Sinatra et al. Is that what you have in mind, or are there albums of his own that you're thinking of? BTW, I listened to "Jazz for Moderns" on my way in to the Chicago Jazz Fest yesterday. Fascinates/delights me as much as ever.

I don't follow you here, Jim. Many jazz performances/compositions are templates for other, possible versions/variations, and some (not a whole lot, perhaps, but some) are not. Is that necessarily to the detriment of the latter music? I don't see why. Does that say something about the nature of that music? Sure. That's one of the things we've been talking about. You ask (you haven't, but you might) whether I can think of other examples in jazz of this. Well, I've already brought up Monk in relation to Tatro, and I'd say that while some of the small ensemble pieces from the Blue Note era obviously have a life as templates, there are others (e.g. "Criss Cross," "Skippy," "Hornin' In," "Carolina Moon") whose virtues are pretty closely tied to their original interpretations. I'd say that Dameron's "Fontainbleu" is another example. The original Prestige version is crucially dependent on the timbres. spirit, etc. of the men Dameron chose to play it (Dorham and Shihab in particular), and the later Riverside recording for a larger ensemble of early '60s NYC studio mainstays is not even close. And how about Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers masterpieces? As it happens, there have been a few living variations on/recreations of Morton and similar primarily ensemble jazz material from the '20s -- in particular by France's Le Petit Jazz Band, founded by cornetist/arranger Jean-Pierre Morel -- but the principles that underlie Le Petit's success suggest why so many others have failed or have been contented to cop surface aspects only. You say (rather dismissively or just sadly?) "Guess you had to be there." Well, not literally, no. But you do have to divine the spirit in which the stuff was made and that still animates the way it works, if in fact it does work. But that may be the real problem here, that Tatro's stuff just doesn't work for/speak to you. And I think I can understand your feelings about "foo foo" -- at one point in the '50s, after I'd been turned on to Silver, Rollins, Blakey, et al., I literally threw into the trash almost every West Coast LP I had (including my copy of the Previn-Rogers "Collaboration," with its Jim Flora cover), as though the mere presence of those recordings in the house were a sign of moral/aesthetic weakness on my part.

Exactly. In a similar vein -- except that the music there fits what Jim calls "foo foo" -- I think of the most West Coast album there is IMO, the Andre Previn-Shorty Rogers "Collaboration," originally RCA, probably now on Fresh Sound. The charts (by Previn and Rogers, detectably different in flavor but from the same menu) are like needle-point practical jokes and are played just that way by the co-leaders, Milt Bernhart, Bud Shank, Bob Cooper (Shank and Cooper doubling a lot on flute and oboe) Jimmy Giuffre, Curtis Counce, a guitarist, and Shelly Manne. The precision and (within the bounds you'd expect) zest of these players in this context is pretty amazing, and I don't believe that there are musicians alive who could play this music anywhere near this well, maybe even play it at all. Those who might have the virtuosity to do it couldn't get within miles of the right spirit -- a blend of game-playing and necessity. Too much of the wrong kind of self-consciousness and it's impossible; you need to have just enough. It's the same reason perhaps that no one, to my mind at least, has written a science fiction story that really works since the late 1950s: The world changed. OK, some post-1959 science fiction stories kind of work, but they're written between quotation marks, and their progeny are still-born.

I've also been impressed by Scott Tinkler, and I'm not an Australian.

Anyone who will be at the Konitz thing at the Cultural Center and that I don't already know, please say hello afterwards if you want to.

Well, I have. Not sure that I do now, though. I've survived, let me put it that way. What I mean is that Graettinger's "objectivity" resulted in a music that effectively captured the essence of what the Kenton band was really "trying to do" in a way that the more self-consciously "progressive" writers for the band were unable to accomplish. To me, his was the truest portrait of the Kenton World, capturing what it really was (or wanted to be) rather than what it thought it was. And like most unvarnished truths, it proved to be a bit more than the objects of it were ready to handle. Very interesting and pretty damn convincing. Thanks.

Ah, yes -- jazz, Jackie Gleason, and Timex. Just the same thing as Pops, right? Does Wynton endorse Swiss Kriss?

Joe, I've heard you play in-person and on record, and you ARE in effect "playing Music of the Future that Synthesizes the Past and Speaks to the NOW." And people genuinely dig it. That's not everything, but how many get even that far?

Hey, Jim: For a host of interlocking reasons -- really good youngish players (who keep cropping up and/or arriving from elsewhere all the time), genuine communal feeling, decent (or better) places to play, affordable housing, etc. -- the Chicago scene that began to bloom in the mid-1990s is getting stronger all the time, or so it seems to me. Of course, you're absolutely right about the "healthy scene" thing; I wouldn't believe this one if I hadn't seen it happen in front of my eyes and if I hadn't had stored in my experience the related but somewhat different healthiness of the AACM scene that took shape here in the mid-1960s. I'm also aware that the interlocking aspect of all this implies a potential fragility -- for instance, if the kind of players who make up this scene or will add to it in the future can't live in Chicago as readily any more because the housing/rental market undergoes a big change, that could be a BIG problem. Likewise if a shift in city regulations or the like knocks out many of the venues where good stuff is happening on maybe five out of every seven nights.

Not to put fine a point on it, and also not to say that Tatro's "Jazz for Moderns" doesn't stand up on purely musical terms, but IMO this is a music that's about (or "about") anxiety -- the notes get fairly specific about the straightened circumstances of Tatro's life at the time (circumstances that arguably were not THAT bad and also were far from unique for someone of his background, era, and artistic inclinations, which is one reason why the mood aspect of this music is affecting to those it affects). And while I know it's a fool's game to generalize from titles, I think that the flat, borrowed from the surrounding culture titles of these pieces may well be speaking to us from the same anxious place: "Dollar Day," "Easy Terms," "Maybe Next Year," etc. As for Graettinger sounding natural to you -- I'll go with "inevitable" and/or "necessary" but natural, whew! This is a music every note of which is designed to say STRANGE. Jim, you must live a colorful life.

You were around then and saw or sensed what I did and what Chris saw close up, right? "Morphs ... what has happened to ... Just the way it is"" suggests a relatively organic development, but all this was pretty much calculated/calibrated, no? If so, that makes a difference. I think back to Brubeck on the cover of Time magazine, which certainly frosted some people's butts because it bore some of the hallmarks of a PR operation. But not only could Paul Desmond really play, and, it could be argued, Brubeck too, their music did speak intensely to the audience it spoke to -- if the Brubeck was during its heyday finally as much a sociological phenomenon as a musical one, it was a phenomenon. But the Wynton thing was about as organic as the "This is your brain on drugs" campaign, though I'd guess you could say it was more effective.

Well, we do have Art Pepper's reading of "Maybe Next Year" on the album "Smack Up," which is a good deal more warm and flexible rhythmically than Lennie Niehaus's on "Jazz for Moderns." But I've always felt that Tatro's writing and the interpretation of it by the guys who play on "Jazz for Moderns" was all of a piece, from several points of view. First, what you hear as "'reading,' not playing," I hear as an ultimately expressive intensity cum tension, though that tension may have been inevitable at the time (and may still be) -- this was HARD stuff to play and, far more so, to solo on; some of the solos were written out by Tatro, and at least one of those, Bob Enevoldson's on "Minor Incident" (not "Minor Intrusion," as I mis-stated above) is among the highlights of the album I believe. Second, perhaps the deal is that this is not really a "players" music in the sense that you have in mind. Also, there's the fact that IMO one these players does play his ass off throughout but in a way that perhaps backs up my sense that this is not really music to blow on -- that player being bassist Ralph Pena, who inhabits his more or less orchestral part (i.e. he's a "section" all by himself) with great taste and intensity. Shelly Manne also is full of zest but also, I'm sure we can agree, too precious at times, in his characteristic West Coast '50s manner. Getting back to the main point you made: Is this supposed to be, or to sound like, "natural" music? I don't think so, any more than Graettinger's "City of Glass" of "This Modern World" were.

I hope so, in time. But then one man's fascination may be another's "foo-foo." The trick with Tatro, I think, is to forget all about the quasi-fugal textures (which mostly I would like to do) and to some degree just accept as given the harmonic "outness" when that's what we have, and instead focus on how these pieces fit together/work themselves out (which will involve some return to the harmonic outness realm at some point, but perhaps from a different perspective). For one thing, Tatro seems to me to be a maker of structures, first, last and foremost, not a guy who wanted to flaunt devices; and those structures have never lost their blend of stone necessity and How did that happen?" mysteriousness for me. Try "Minor Intrusion" in particular.

I don't think we can know, because Wynton the "face of jazz" was quite a creation on the part of many people over the years, a feat of social engineering the likes of which I haven't seen otherwise in my lifetime. For one thing, the backing aspect, which I think was many-sided and complex, would be repeatable only if you began with similar human interest/status factors that wqould be difficult if not impossible to repeat -- well-spoken, polite youthfulness; jazz plus classical credibility or the like; the sense of an art that was artistically worthy/noble but commercially beleagured and thus in need of a young Lochinvar, etc. For another, once Wynton "the face" attained that position, while the game was not over (it could still have blown via scandal, gross inepitude, you name it), the whole structure that had placed the face there now had a deep vested interest in supproting him in that position, if only to verify the good judgment of the important people and the process in which all had participated/were participating. Which, again, is not to say that Wynton isn't doing a whizbang, hands-job as JLC's CEO, as far as that goes.

This fits in neatly with a point a friend who's a talented NYC-area hornman/bandleader/composer/arranger once made to me about one of the downsides of JLC for musicians who are not a part of it. Used to be, he explained, that with his recordings and press clippings he could in most years arrange a month-long-or-so regional or multi-region tour for his ensemble of venues like Harriman Jewell that have non-pop concert series that are not exclusively classical. There are lots of such places and series out there in America, and while it required some savvy, plus much planning and effort, on his part, my friend explained that it worked out quite well for everyone. Then along came JLC, and that market went to hell. First, the presenters by and large were themselves not that savvy about jazz; provided with the surefire JLC brand, that spot on their series roster was automatically filled to their satisfaction; no one else need apply. Moreover, and this is where it really gets insidious, supposing a series has in prior years budgeted enough for jazz to present more than one such concert. Well, the price for the JLC Orch, or any JLC offshoot ensemble, is several times the price of my friend's band (five times more, I think he said) or, he assures me, any comparable ensemble or visiting artist -- say, Bob Brookmeyer leading a good nearby college big band through his most recent charts after having having rehearsed them for a few days. Thus, not only does JLC hog the gigs, its jacked-up premium fees virtually eliminate the chance that any other jazz artists will perform at such venues, because thry've placed this year's budget for jazz entirely in JLC's pockets.