Larry Kart

Hmm. It's "My Old Flame" on the LP of "Consequence," "I Hear a Rhapsody" on the LP of "Action," and the Jackie McLean discography http://www.jazzdisco.org/mclean/dis/c/ shows no sign that he ever recorded "Don't Blame Me."

Don't know if it's available at present, but a prime KD album from about the same period as "Quiet Kenny" (maybe a year later) is his first (of two, the other of tunes from "Showboat") on the Time label, "Jazz Contemporary," with Charles Davis, Steve Kuhn, Butch Warren or Jimmy Garrison on bass, and drummer Buddy Enlow. A nice recording too, Earle Brown at the controls.

What about Sunday night? Strange that that's been left off -- and that's not Jazzshrink's doing; that's what I find online so far. I assume/hope that Konitz will be on the Sunday night bill.

I'm not a big Swallow fan (liked him more in his ancient days as a acoustic bassist), but I enjoyed that Talmor-Swallow album quite a bit. Maybe that makes me a Talmor fan; the references in his writing to Stravinsky's "L' Histoire du Soldat" (the album is balanced more toward writing than blowing) don't come across as the post-modern trickery you might expect but as acts of genuine affinity. Also, one of the semi-incidental reasons I like the album is that Swallow's bass is recorded more clearly than is usually the case in my non-comprehensive experience of his work.

Blue Note jumbled up the typewritten pages of the notes I wrote for the LP issue of this back in 1979, and apparently the CD retains the original incoherent jumble. This came up here a ways back, and I explained how to un-jumble things; if that post can't be found and anyone cares, I'll try again.

"I wonder why he continued to play in the Octet for so long?" Because it was a semi-regular gig, I would guess. We don't always have that much choice about how we put bread on the table. Also, he did have some room there to do his own thing.

After I introduced myself, he quoted, word for word from memory, a paragraph I'd written in praise of him almost 20 years before in a review for Down Beat of a Chicago performance by the Freddie Hubbard Quintet. This was quite surprising and pleasing to me, but it also made me feel a bit blue, as though he'd kept those words pressed in his memory book, so to speak, because in the intervening years he hadn't received that many other words of the same kind.

One thing I do remember saying in that review was that rhythmically Murray was "like Charlie Ventura on roller skates."

Yes, Relyles, I remember that performance and that review. I didn't use the word "crap," though -- couldn't in a newspaper, at least not back then -- but I might have if I could. Heard him again a few years later in NYC at Sweet Basil with his Octet and had the same reaction. Interestingly, perhaps, I spoke after the last set to a member of the band, an older veteran saxophonist whose work I like, and he made it pretty clear (he brought this up himself) that his opinion of the leader, musically, was not favorable.

"in general i don't like liner notes that sound like they were writting by a jewish guy on acid." OK, I'll stay away from the stuff. And now that I think of it -- "in general"? How many can there be? BTW, I'm pretty sure that acid was not the substance of choice for David A. Himmelstein, author of those "Settin' the Pace" notes.

All I'll say is that Chewy etc. is the most annoying fake name in the history of Western man.

It might be Alice McLeod, later Alice Coltrane.

A favorite was the Wally Wood-Harvey Kurtzman parody of "Superman" in which the caped hero, Superduperman, runs into another caped hero, Captain Marbles (as in Captain Marvel) -- or rather he runs into annoying little Billy Spafon, boy reporter, who transforms himself into Captain Marbles by saying "SHAZOOM!" (as in "SHAZAAM!"). In any case, Superduperman says, "Shazoom? Vas ist das Shazoom?" -- to which little Billy's reply is: "Strength Health Aptitude Zeal Ox, power of Ox, power of another Money."

Apparently Bill Clinton is a tad promiscuous in this respect too. This is from Russian tenor saxophonist Igor Butman's website: "Clinton described this performance [involvling Butman] in his book 'My Life': 'Before I left Moscow, Putin hosted a small dinner in the Kremlin with a jazz concert afterward, featuring Russian musicians from teenagers to an octogenarian. The finale began on a dark stage, a haunting series of tunes by my favorite living tenor saxophonist, Igor Butman. John Podesta, who loved jazz as much as I did, agreed with me that we had never heard a finer live performance."

I have "Convergence Zone" and enjoy it; will look for this one for sure.

Definitely "At Ease." Hawkins is in fine form on both, but I recall Dan Morgenstern complaining (and, having listened again, I agree) that the drummer on the "The Hawk Relaxes," Andrew Cyrille, often plays for some damn reason in an arch, almost businessman's bounce, "two"-feel manner -- as though he thought Hawkins's music were some kind of tired old man proposition. Either that or at this relatively early stage in his career, Cyrille didn't have enough experience to comfortably handle a walking-ballad groove. I'm not normally a big Osie Johnson fan (he's the drummer on "At Ease"), but he knows what to do.

Chris -- I always felt that Hentoff's notes, after a certain early period, were compiled from clippings. On the other hand, when I was an adolescent reading Down Beat in the mid 1950s, Nat was about the only guy reviewing records for DB then who was trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. Even if some of his opinions were second-hand (I think I suspected that even then), he was going to the some of the right people to find out what to say. When Martin Williams came on board at DB for a while a few years further on, it seemed fairly clear that he was one of Nat's gurus, as their later association at The Jazz Review would suggest. And I agree with Allen that Hentoff has been running on empty for a long, long time.

Robin Holloway (b. 1943) is an interesting, quirky British composer, best known for his Second and Third Concertos for Orchestra (both on NMC), and an interesting, quirky critic, best known for his “Debussy and Wagner” (Eulenberg Books). I just got my hands on his collection of critical pieces “Robin Holloway on Music: Essays and Diversions, 1963-2003” (Continuum), and was pretty much stunned by a passage from the essay “Haydn: The Musician’s Musician.” [The part that stunned me comes at the very end, but I’ll have to quote at length to give that coda some context.] Haydn, Holloway writes, “is the most self-conscious... the purest of all composers; his art has the fewest external referents, is more completely about itself than any other…. Haydn alone gives no handle, there is nothing to latch on to, biographically or in subject matter…. This music is pure because it cannot be translated. Despite one’s ready recognition of a ragbag of tropes…it owes less than any other to metaphor, simile, association… He is music’s supreme intellectual. Yet every lover of Haydn recognizes within the cerebral power many characteristics difficult to name without absurdity, so wholly are they musicalised. Highs spirits, all the way from physical brio…to jokes, puns, games of surprising intellectual and even expressive weight .. touching on rarified places which no other means could reach…. There is serenity and hymn-like calm; Enlightenment openness, sage and humane; radiance without shadowlike tempera, pure colors on a white base. Their opposite -- twisted strangeness, contortion, mannerist extremity--is almost as frequent, and this too is shadowless in that is never morbid…. Then there is deep still contemplation, simultaneously remote and glowing” etc. etc.…. "How are we to take music that seems to evoke such ambiguities and contrarieties as these, but that certainly supersedes their merely verbal expression—that offers, in its own intrinsic terms, a play of mood, as of material, simultaneously so straightforward and so ungraspable…. "This is the area at the heart of all the arts where structure and process fuse inseparably into expression; the total result is an emanation, however direct or oblique, from the unique individual who is doing the making and summoning into being. "Music is about notes, whether the upshot is Tristan’s delirium, Tchaikovsky’s floods of passion, cardiac convulsions in Mahler and Berg, or any sonata, trio, quartet, or symphony by Haydn. If it’s not good composing, then neither is it good expression of an emotion, or depiction of a character, or evocation of sunlight playing on the waves or all the rest. If ‘words, not ideas, make a poem,' how much more true for the relatively unconnotational art of music…. "Yet music does render all of those extraneous things. If it were indeed just ‘pure music,’ something—the main thing—would be missing…. So...how can unmitigated concentration upon the process of composition be at the same time a quest for what Debussy called ‘the naked flesh of emotion’? It must be that the materials of music themselves not only convey passion, pictures and so forth, but that they actually ARE passionate and pictorial—intrinsically, of their nature.” I don't know about you, but I'd been standing when I first read that last sentence, I would have had to sit down.

I have him on Conrad Herwig's "Unseen Universe," with some of the same players who crop up on his own Criss Cross albums, so I assume his playing there is pretty representative. He's got chops and fingers but seems fairly faceless. In that general bag -- if it is the same bag -- I prefer, say, Scott Wendholt. Sipiagin sounds to me like a guy whose melodic lines, such as they are, are almost wholly determined by his favorite "hip" harmonic patterns. Herwig, by contrast, tends to push ahead on both fronts simultaneously and aggressively, though I could see where a reasonable person might find him a bit blatant or flashy at times.

Handel's "Israel in Egypt," cond. Frederic Waldman (Decca). Terrific choral singing, sound has remarkable punch. HIP or not, I'm tossing my John Eliot Gardiner "IIE." "The Marriage of Figaro," cond. Leinsdorf, w/ Tozzi, Roberta Peters, Lisa Della Casa, George London, et al. (RCA). Leinsdorf is a bit brisk, but there's some fine singing here, Tozzi esp., and it's great to be reminded again what an amazing work this is.

Here, toward the end, is another, somewhat contrary view of the Marsh-Chambers encounter from the booklet notes I wrote for the Mosaic Tristano-Konitz-Marsh set (they're reprinted in my book "Jazz In Search of Itself"). The opening passage refers to the Konitz-Marsh Atlantic date: If Marsh is, as mentioned above, a compulsive structuralist, and Konitz is a compulsive melodist, the consequences are vividly evident here , against Bauer, Clarke, and Pettiford’s dark pulsating backdrop. One doesn’t want to sound mystical about this, but Marsh proceeds as though silence were a kind of space, a blank neutral medium--almost a void--that comes to life only when (and because) his lines, his living thoughts, adventurously stretch across it. For Konitz, though, silence is alive, a creature or being--each note he plays almost literally touches its flanks, and the resulting dialogue of message-bearing pressures will increasingly become one of his chief sources of inspiration. Thus, in 1961, Konitz would seek out and successfully record with the most aggressive drummer in jazz at the time, Elvin Jones; while in December 1957, Marsh will almost come to grief in the company of Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. Describing the partnership between Chambers and Jones in the liner notes to Hank Mobley’s Poppin’, which was recorded less than two months before the first of the two dates that make up the Atlantic Marsh album, I wrote that the drummer and bassist “shared a unique concept of where ‘one’ is--just a hair behind the beat but rigidly so, with the result that the time has a stiff-legged, compulsive quality. The beat doesn’t flow but jerks forward in a series of spasmodic leaps, creating a climate of nervous intensity that was peculiar to the era. Either the soloist jumps or he is fried to a crisp on the spot.” Well, Marsh did survive the encounter, and he is a bit more at ease on the next date in January 1958, when Paul Motian takes the place of Jones and pianist Ronnie Ball drops out. For even though Chambers’s broad rhythmic impasto, so full of directional energy, still threatens to ride right over the nodes of rhythmic ambivalence that Warne must leave exposed, the absence of a chordal instrument makes just that much more space available to the soloist, who is especially fluent on “Yardbird Suite.” One wonders, though, what this album would have been like if Pettiford and Clarke had been present.

IIRC, the four girls in Four Girls Four at that time were O'Connell, Rose Marie, Rosemary Clooney, and Margaret Whiting.

I mention this only because she gone now (d. 1993) and because I have some personal, anecdotal semi-confirmation, but I've heard that one of the most so-inclined of the prominent band singers of that era was that cute little All-American girl Helen O'Connell. I ran into her in the late '70s or early '80s, when she was member of Four Girls Four, gave the act a good review, and was then approached over the phone by O'Connell in a coy, "I MUST thank you" manner that I chose not to follow up on. She was still pretty cute, too, albeit in a slighty wacked-out, Blythe Danner manner. Hey, it coulda been Rose Marie.

A retired big-band singer gets an offer from a record producer to lay down some of her old hits for a nostalgia album. She brings her charts to the studio and is surprised to see only the producer there. "Where's the band?" she asks. "No need for a band any more," smiles the producer. "Everything is computerized." "No piano? No conductor?" she asks. "Nope, everything is in this synthesizer. Your charts are already in there. All we do is press a button." "How about clarinets, sax, horns?" "Right here in this machine, never tell the difference." "How about a drummer," she asks. "Nope," says the producer, "this rhythm machine takes the beat and runs with it all by itself." "Well," says the singer, "then who do I sleep with?"

There was some spirited back and forth about "Interstellar Space" beginning at page 11 on this thread: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...%20space&st=150