Larry Kart

Bertrand --- You're right. I was thinking of At the Cafe Bohemia, recorded 9/9/55 at the club by RVG, and adding to it Dance of the Infidels, rec. 11/14/57 in Rudy's studio, which has Woods instead of McClean and a new bass-drum team (Knobby Totah and Nick Stabulus). A senior moment. On the other hand, there's enough intensity on At the Cafe Bohemia for two albums. The title of the first track, Jackie's "Snakes," says it all.

God help me -- my second order of 20. Also, a recommendation or two from the sale titles for those who might not know of these: George Wallington's Jazz for the Carriage Trade, with Donald Byrd, Phil Woods, Teddy Kotick (I think) and Art Taylor. This from that early vintage period, 1956, when (IMO) Phil Woods was still an excellent jazz musician, not a jazzy musician; he and the young agile Byrd make a fine team. This was BTW the successor group (both of them working bands, at the Cafe Bohemia in NYC as I recall) to the one Wallington had with the young raw Jackie McLean, which itself made a couple of urgent LPs. Which reminds me, the Bobby Jaspar on which Wallington is a sideman is interesting -- in part because it includes the young Elvin Jones (Jaspar's fellow sideman with J.J. Johnson at the time). Maybe I'm just perverse, but I'm intrigued by the contrast (even the clash) in time feel between Wallington's linear, more or less pure bop conception and Elvin's (still in its early stages) elliptical patterns.

Haven't been following Weiss as assiduously as I probably should have -- though I own and have always enjoyed his 1986 Criss Cross debut and also dug and (I think) wrote a bit about him most times he came to Chicago with Johnny Griffin in the '80s -- but the other day I picked up Weiss's 1998 SteepleChase trio album "Milestones" (with Paul Gill and Joe Farnsworth) and am delighted by it. Piano playing that's more or less boppish never wears out its welcome with me, though on the other hand I want it to be as wholly alive and risky as it was with Bud, Duke Jordan, Al Haig, George Wallington, and others of that ilk -- freeze-dried, more or less retro, "Notice how I only color between the lines -- don't I get extra credit for that?"" boppish piano drives me crazy. In any case, while Weiss's playing often has an air of elegance and reserve to it (a la Haig and, if it comes to that, Teddy Wilson -- especially in his delicate sense of touch), within this at times one can detect a digital/intellectual near-frenzy at work, which brings Wallington to mind (at least to my mind) and that seems to me to be in touch with bop's true spirit. To put it another way, Weiss isn't just playing, or so it seems to me -- he is in pursuit. In any case, this is one fine album. The title track BTW is the John Lewis piece that Miles recorded with Bird on tenor, not the later Miles piece of the same name. And dig how Weiss's recasting of "Like Someone in Love" in the key of B almost turns it into another tune altogether (and in a way that seems organic rather than tricky). Jeez, he even makes "Wave" sound fresh.

Let me add that IMO the Kenny Drew Trio album, with Chambers and Philly Joe, which is part of the sale, is superb. It may be my favorite Drew album.

UBU -- Earthy IS part of the sale, which is why I mentioned it. It's McKusick's own Prestige album that is not of the sale. Sorry for any confusion.

A warning and a recommendation: Don't get that Kenny Drew Plays Harry Warren and Harold Arlen disc (I say this as someone who bought it months ago). While the idea of a Drew-Wilbur Ware duo is irresistible (at least it was to me), the idea here was for Drew to deliver almost Carmen Cavallaro-like dinner music readings of these standards, which he does without a trace of irony. No improvisation, and Ware is nearly inaudible. An interesting one that might sneak beneath the radar is the jam session titled Earthy, with Art Farmer, Hal McKusick, Al Cohn, Kenny Burrell, Mal Waldron, Teddy Kotick, and Ed Thigpen. McKusick gets more space to blow here than he ever did, except for his own very good Prestige album of this time (with the choice rhyhthm team of Paul Chambers [very clearly recorded] and Charlie Persip -- it's not in the sale), and everyone else is in fine form (especially Farmer), though there is one very fast track that's a fair bit unsettled rhythmically for a while until one of the soloists finally gets everyone to agree where "one" is. (BTW, of the players listed above, who do you think that might have been?) Even so, it's an intriguing date with a flavor of its own -- "blowing" in that solos are lengthy, but Farmer and McKusick especially bring their organizational temperaments to the party.

IIRC, that Playboy After Dark video is worth the price for Lenny Bruce. Not that Lenny is that funny on it, again IIRC (I'm going on late-teenage memories of the original broadcast), but it conveys quite potently the ticking- time-bomb nature of Lenny's presence, the sense (which pretty much was, as they say, no joke) that he might in the next instant say or do ANYTHING. I believe it was the debut show that Lenny was on, and he eagerly zeroes in on and ratchets up Hefner's understandable extreme nervousness.

Four tunes ("All the Things You Are," "Centrepiece," "Body and Soul," and "Just You, Just Me") from Hawkins' Playboy Fest performance (probably the entire set) were issued in 1976 on a Spotlight LP (SPJ137 -- "Blowin' Up a Breeze"). Haven't listened in a while, but my memory is that it's among the best Hawkins from that period -- almost frighteningly intense and creative. Higgins' rhythm section partners were Bob Cranshaw and Walter Perkins.

I may have mentioned this before, but my only in-person encounter with Stanley, aside from a weird phone call from him in which he tried to get me to agree that Lester Bowie was a charlatan, then rang off abruptly when I said that I didn't think so at all, was at the Village Vanguard back in the mid-1980s, on the night Thad Jones the then-new director of the Basie band had made his debut in that role. (I was in town to interview Jones on that occasion, and it proved to be one heck of a long strange funny evening, but that's a story I eventually hope to tell in full, along with other similar ones, within the pages of a book.) In any case, Kenny Burrell was at the Vanguard, Thad wanted to see his old Detroit buddy, so we went. Between sets, Burrell spotted Thad, his face lit up and he began to make his way to Thad's table, but he was intercepted by Stanley, who avidly embraced Burrell and began to shower him with loud, grandiloquent praise while he continued to held Kenny in a vise-like hug -- all of this, it seemed clear to me, designed to proclaim to all present, as though his goal were to assemble a living billboard, that Stanley was on the most of intimate terms with the likes of Burrell. Certainly, Stanley's words of praise were pitched at a level that brought the ears of just about everyone in the room into play. Kenny, I believe, found this scene annoying and embarrassing; I know for sure that Thad and some others at our table (among them Tommy Flanagan) did.

Relyles -- It's been up and down since then for me with Stewart, but I'm still on board. I found a recent Criss Cross from him with Joe Cohn to be almost unlistenable because it was suddenly full of overt Rollins-isms -- I can't take much of that. Not because I don't like Rollins but because certain of Sonny's magniloquent burps and chortles are so totally his that you'd think it would be obvious that they can't be borrowed. On the other hand, Stewart is in very good form on two Ryan Kisor CDs -- "Awakening" (Criss Cross), rec. 2002, and "This Is Ryan" (Video Arts), rec. 2005. I also like Stewart's own "Tenor and Soul" (Video Arts), rec. 2005, though here Joe Cohn sounds rather blatant-obvious to me. Stewart also is in a good groove on the group Planet Jazz's "In Orbit" (Sharp Nine), rec. 2005, with Joe Magnarelli, Peter Bernstein, et al. playing music written by the late drummer Johnny Ellis, but there's an alternate world/retro feel to Ellis's writing and to the playing of pianist Spike Wilner and bassist Neil Miner (like "It's 1958 again, but we've got more chops than the guys who were playing this back then, so should we flaunt that or disguise it") that kind of creeps me out. As I said before, it's the more Mobley-esque side of Stewart that attracts me, because that seems to lead him in more personal directions that his Sonny-ish side. The main thing is that he's a relaxed/vigorous maker of real, swinging melodies -- one feeding into the next and building, and with little or no sense that he drawing from a bag of licks.

And what's a "jazz canon"? Does he mean anything canonic (i.e. music in which one part imitates note for note and overlaps another part at a particular pitch e.g. canon at a fourth) that happens to occur in a setting that's more or less jazz-like (which would be a possible but fairly useless and/or really sloppy thing to say). Or does he mean that there is a particular way to play canonically in jazz that's different from the ways one might play canonically elsewhere? What a maroon.

"Ben Watson, music journalist and longstanding contributor to The Wire, Hi-Fi News and Signal To Noise, is well known for his deviant and polemical music criticism." That would seem to explain it.

20 -- for the usual reason. It is fun when you go from 19 to 20, and the price of your order drops. I enjoyed that so much when I went from 9 to 10 that I had to see if I could legitimately (hah!) get to 20. No problem as it turned out, though 30 might have been.

To complicate things further, Richmond also was known as Richman (his given name, I suspect).

A Richmond solo with Dorsey can be found here, on "Puddle Wump": http://www.rhapsody.com/tommydorsey/thecom...dtranscriptions

Yes, but Taylor's ballad mode was big-toned, out of Hawkins-Webster. This solo is, as Alexander said up top, rather Getz-like in its lightness of tone and somewhat wispy agility. And if you've heard Boomie Richmond, it sounds exactly like him. He was, again, a very distinctive player -- that neo-Bud Freeman/Eddie Miller "gargle" of his is the giveaway.

"Car wrecks," exactly. And I share Jim's apprehension that (to use a pompous phrase, but it's the only one I can think of) the tone of discourse at work on that JC thread will somehow inadvertently infect this place. At times you can almost feel it happening, as when that "uppity" thing flew over the transom. It's like part of your brain starts to fry.

I don't care what any written or on-line "source" says -- if you've heard Boomie Richmond (b. 1921, former Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman sideman, active in the studios from the '60s), and I have, that sounds exactly like Richmond -- a kind of pleasantly gargly offshoot of Bud Freeman and/or Eddie Miller, with an admixture of Pres. Also, it doesn't sound a bit like anything I've ever heard from Sam "The Man" Taylor, who was a big-toned R&b-ish player, sort of an older version of King Curtis. Taylor had several hit singles in the '50s and made commercialy succesful albums as well. About Richmond (Given name Abraham Samuel Richmond), as fate would have it, I just picked up on Monday for 99 cents one of his rather few moments in the jazz solo sun -- a mid-1950s six-tune date for Jazztone under clarinetist Peanuts Hucko's leadership in which those two, plus trumpter Billy Butterfield, guitarist Mundell Lowe, pianist Hank Jones, bassist Jack Lesberg, and drummer Morey Feld attempt to recreate the sound of the Goodman Sextet with Cootie Williams, George Auld, and Charlie Christian. I don't usually care for re-creations, but there's some fine playing here. Othe side of the LP, title "Dedicated Jazz," is in the same spirit -- a Rex Stewart-led neo-Ellington small group date with Hilton Jefferson, Lawrence Brown, Danny Bank and rhythm. Also fine stuff, and it's one of the very few times on record when Bank takes a solo. In any case, I'll bet anything that the tenor soloist on "True Love Ways" is Richmond. He is/was a very distinctive player.

Some very good stuff here, but don't miss the Hampton-Granz date that's not on it, "Hamp and Getz." "Cherokee" and "Jumpin' at the Woodside" in particular are on fire, and the rhythm section -- Lou Levy, Leroy Vinnegar, and Shelly Manne -- is, in case I haven't said it before, on fire. BTW, am I the only who hears some passing kinship or overlap between Hampton and Monk, on what, for want of a better term, could be called the rhythm-melody level?

What he does with vowel sounds on "Willow Weep For Me" -- how he colors them both timbrally and emotionally and links them up in long storytelling lines (the latter in ways I tried to write about once and failed, but or because the things he's doing are so subtle and powerful)!

Writing that, from where I sat, was perhaps not wholly unlike (albeit in a reactive mode) what you were doing in the studio. Sort of (as a White Sox fan since 1951) an A.J. Pierzynski moment -- you're at the plate, the game is on the line, the ball is on its way, and now's the time. The answer to the song titled "Why Was I Born?"

Glad to be of service, though it took me a while to figure out how and why I'd confused things there. And to clear up any lingering confusion, I did mean to say that L-R-G and The Maze are as important as music gets. (I still remember how it felt to hear those recordings for the first time. Excitement, awe, the dawn of a new world, you name it -- probably like being at the premiere of "Le Sacre." I thought the top of my head had come off. Likewise for the sax quartet version of Nonaah.)

Well, here's one source: http://www.samburtis.com/forum/viewtopic.p...87964f89ab1f86d but I don't think that's the one I ran into. BTW, the poster here is Danish trombonist Erling Kroner.

I knew someone was going to ask, Lazaro, and I don't recall -- except that the source was definitive. Also, if you listen closely and know Persip's style, there are some definite Persip touches. He was one hell of a drummer, especially behind a big band. If you can find it, check him out on Bill Potts' "The Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess."

Yes. But even so, it's hard for me to imagine Stanley (or anyone who's not certifiable) actually sitting down and writing that, then thinking, "Yeah -- that's cool, I'll send it."