Larry Kart

I think that the Trane-ish things that Cannonball picked up when they were working side-by-side usually didn't sit that well with rest of/the core (IMO) Cannonball's style, though I admit that it does come together for him by and large on "In Chicago." Cannonball at his best -- again IMO -- was primarily a soulful, melodic player (at his best on albums like "Cannonball Takes Charge" and "Something Else" (esp. "Autumn Leaves"). When he leaned heavily on Trane-ish upper extensions of the chords, the results sounded to me like dill pickles with chocolate sauce.

Sorry to admit that I missed this one when it first came out (though I used to own a copy of "Groove, Funk and Soul"), delighted to make its acquaintance now. Though I'll jhave to go back and check, this probably is the best Edwards I've heard -- in large part, as Allen Songer said, because this was a marvelous WORKING group; the relaxed, deep interaction among all parties here usually doesn't come about otherwise. Terrific listening rhythm section. Joe Castro had his own thing, especiually in terms of time and touch; Vinnegar is in top form; and Higgins at that age ... well he was always a joy, but when he was this young there's a special freshness to him, in part because he's more snare oriented than he'd become. Not better than the later Higgins, just a little different. An excellent recording too, even by Contemporary's standards; everything sounds knitted together spatially yet properly distinct. Interesting how much Teddy sounds like Von Freeman here at odd moments e.g. "Scrapple" and "What's New." While it's a blowing date, every piece has the no-waste wholeness of a fully worked-out composition. Thanks again for picking this; I might never have heard it otherwise.

Two posts about "Bluebeard's" that I made a few years ago on Rec Music Classical Recordings: FWIW, the volume of "Opera on Record" in which there was a detailed survey of "Bluebeard's Castle" performances came down firmly on the side of the second Janos Ferencsik with Katalin Kasza and Gyorgy Melis (c. 1970, Hungaroton). I have it on LP and see it's available on CD. Tatiania Troyanos (with Boulez) must be heard, but Kasza is excellent, too, and singing in her native language, and again, whoever did that "Opera on Record" survey found Ferencsik's grasp of the score to be superior to that of all other interpreters. (Subjectively, he strikes me as a good deal more intense than Boulez.) More on the "Bluebeard's Castle" survey from "Opera on Record 3." The author of the chapter, David Murray, says that Ferencsik II's Gyorgy Melies, "makes an uncommonly youthful Bluebeard, [but] he has the advantage that the role lies perfectly for his voice," while Katalin Kasza "is Judith to the life, nervily eager, selflessly intense. She is as precise with her music as any Judith (more than most) and commands an astringent lower register, without any throaty bark or adipose richness. By comparison, Christa Ludwig's Judith sounds almost maternal, too sympathetic and cuddlesome: how could she prosecute such a dangerous enterprise? The immediate pathos of the Kertesz reduces the objective dimension; Solti and Boulez, in their different ways, are hieratic at the expense of dramatic urgency and contrast. Theirs are distinguished performances, but Ferencsik strikes a true balance." Also, Murray comes up with this line: "[While] the opera does not lend itself to excerpts, someone did exclaim excitedly after a Boulez concert performance, 'They ought to release the Fifth Door as a single!'

Looks like a mostly demolished concrete building to me.

About Dexter and the "lifestyle," Joe Segal told me once that Dexter seemed to have a knack (probably Joe was talking mostly about the old days) for getting busted when he was carrying way more often than were a whole lot of other guys -- e.g. Bird, who according to Joe seemed to have a magical shield that allowed him to slide through or past almost all such situations unscathed (at least in terms of John Law).

I remember writing of a hesitant (to say the least) but I thought personal and moving Halliday performance at the Chicago Jazz Festival, perhaps as part of a jam session set. The next day, with the review in the paper, I ran across Dan Morgenstern, who had been there the night before and who said something along the lines of "So you play favorites and/or give people a pass, too." A weird moment, because I didn't think I'd done that at all, but maybe I had. As possible confirmation, one way or the other, I also have positive memories of Carl Leukaufe's playing. And Jack Noren, on a good night, could be like a be-bop Baby Dodds.

I reviewed it for Down Beat (11/28/68) and gave it ***1/2 out of *****. Memory (don't have the album anymore) tells me that's about right. (Excerpt: "Except for 'Imagine,' the tunes are written by Land, and they all seem to scale the same modal mountain.") A harmonica feature for Donald Bailey doesn't help. Didn't know there was another drummer who played the harmonica, did you, Randissimo? Or maybe you did.

About the Hollywood, I don't recall exactly why (it was some time ago), but I think it was that they struck me as too consistently plush and/or too focused on surmounting certain daunting challenges to their technical skill/coordination (which they arguably met as well as anyone) but with too little sense of tonal drama and danger/risk. The feeling all this left me with is that their Beethoven was boring, for all their expertise,and the late Beethoven quartets aren't boring. Also, the LP pressings I had weren't the greatest.

Thanks, Ghost and Jazzbo. I have JUMP, GEORGIE, JUMP, Goodman PLAYS EDDIE SAUTER and PLAYS MEL POWELL Jack Jenny's STARDUST, and a previous LP issue of most of the Wilson big band stuff. The rest I'll look into; the Thornhill sounds intriguing, as does the Basie Jubilee (which I think I may have).

Thanks, Garth -- I'm on it. Any other Hep discs you particularly want to recommend while the Allegro sale is on? I have a fair bunch already and to fill out this order I added Mary Ann McCall's "You're Mine You," "The Artistry of Artie Shaw," Harry James' "Big John Special," and (from another label and realm) Bruno Maderna's Violin Concerto on Stradivarius.

Anyone familiar with the complete Beethoven set rec. 1969-72 by the Bartok String Quartet? I've had their middle quartets on Hungaroton LPs for years and remain impressed. For the late quartets, he said -- preparing to be hit very hard with a big stick -- I kind of like the Fine Arts. For some strange reason my LP set of the early quartets (also the Bartoks? I'm not sure) seems to have vanished, so I'm in the market for a complete set if a really satisfying one exists. Over the years I've had and dumped the Guarnieri (middle) and the Hollywood (late), probably several others that I don't recall now.

Some excerpts from bassist Bill Crow’s piece about Ware from The Jazz Review, circa 1959-60, reprinted in the OOP book "Jazz Panorama," an anthology of Jazz Review material. The phrase of mine that Kalo likes is pretty much a summation of what Crow says here. Crow's description of what Ware does on "Decidedly" is particularly important, I think. There are parallels here to Lester Young in Ware's ability to be at once in and ahead of a whole series of changes -- with the effect of that "at once-ness" being tremendously potent, not only harmonically but rhythmically as well, given the simulataneous deep-rootedness and horizontal drive these ambiguities create. "…an unusually original artist…. One of our truly great jazz musicians.… He has chosen an approach that does not follow the general evolution of bass style from Blanton through Pettiford, Brown, Heath, Chambers, Mingus, etc. Wilbur uses the same tools that other bassists use, but his concentration is more on percussion, syncopation, and bare harmonic roots than on the achievment of a wind instrument quaaity in phrasing and melodic invention. His solos are extremely melodic in their own way, logically developed and well balanced, but they are permutations of the primary triad or reshuffling of the root line rather than melodies built from the higher notes of the chord…. On ‘Decidedly’ from "Mulligan Meets Monk" there are a number of good examples of Wilbur’s approach to the bass line…. After Gerry’s breaks [Wilbur] has the harmonic control, since Monk lays out, but rather than immediately walking chords he plays a counterrhythm on a G harmonic through the first three changes, where G is the fifth of the first chord, the ninth of the second chord and an anticpation of the root that the third chord resolves toward (D7 to G7)…. He was an ideal bassist for Monk, since he seems to share Monk’s conception of the value of open space, repeated figures, cycles of intervals, rhythmic tension and relaxation…. Besides the variety and color that Wilbur creates in his lines, there is the most obvious feature of his playing, a tremendous 4/4 swing that has the same loose, imprecise but very alive feeling of carefree forward motion that you hear in Kenny Clarke’s drumming…. The best image I can think of to suggest it is Cannonball Adderley doing the Lindy. There is flowing movement all through the measure and not just where the notes are….Wilbir is for me a reaffirmation of the idea that deep expression can be reached through simplification of form -- each new discovery need not always be a more complex one. The difference between the extremely sophisticated simplicity of Wilbur Ware and the primitive simplicity of a beginner is as wide as that between simple drawings of Klee or Miro and those of a child…. Wilbur’s terms are simple and his artistic expression most profound."

Thanks, Sidewinder. I did a search to see if there had been much said about "Oblique" before, but for some reason (no doubt a goof on my part) that thread didn't come up. And thanks, Steve. Reminds me of a thought that I and others I'm sure have had -- that someone should sift through Jim Sangrey's vast bag of posts and somehow assemble it into a manuscript. I did that with my previously published stuff that seemed worth preserving, and it worked out well, but Jim is an absolute one-off -- perhaps the shrewdest, most curious, actual player who is willing and able to capture his insights in words at a very high level ... and at length, too, of course!

I've had this on LP since it came out in Japan in 1980, and it's a gem. Hutcherson and Hancock are in great form; there are two fascinating Joe Chambers pieces (that his playing is superb throughout goes without saying); but I think I'm most taken by the late Albert Stinson's bass solo on "My Joy" -- perhaps the scariest 60 seconds of music I know. Brilliantly conceived and executed -- IMO Stinson, Russell Thorne, and Gary Peacock were the three most gifted post-LaFaro bassists -- it's scary because it's at once so damn logical and so damn strange (a la haunted or tormented). Every time I hear it, I tell myself that's it's silly to think that this turbulent swatch of music more or less predicts Stinson's death two years later at age 25 of a drug overdose, but it feels that way every time.

The one album I think I've played the most this year is tenor saxophonist Ted Brown's "Preservation" (Steeplechase), with Harold Danko, Dennis Irwin, and Jeff Hirschfield. Tremendously fresh, soulful, melodic, swinging improvisation -- not unrelated to Ted's one-time model and former colleague Warne Marsh, but Ted has been his own man for decades.

Good detective work, Couw. That must have been what happened.

Anyone else notice an odd glitch in Cuscuna's portion of the liner notes? He writes (or rather Blue Note today has him writing:) "'Sonic Boom' [i.e. the piece itself, not the whole album] ... was recorded on April 28, exactly two weeks later [than the other tunes on the date]. For some reason this seems to have been a pattern with a number of Lee Morgan dates. The band comes in, gets one tune and suddenly the session dissipates. The same personnel comes back a week or two later and runs through all the tunes effortlessly." Which, given what they have Cuscuna saying in the first sentence, makes no sense. But on the original LP issue of "Sonic Boom," that portion of Cuscuna's notes begins: "'Sonic Boom' ... was recorded on April 14, 1967, while all the other tunes were recorded exactly two weeks later" -- which makes the next two sentences about the "pattern with a number of Lee Morgan dates" perfectly reasonable. Weird -- because while I'm used to Blue Note of the 1979 era (when "Sonic Boom" was first issued) screwing up liner notes (they jumbled up the ones I wrote for Morgan's "Consequence" back then and have now reprinted them that way), why would they introduce an error into notes that made sense the first time around?

Haven't seen it myself yet, but here's a review from IMO the best film critic there is, Dave Kehr -- formerly of the the Chicago Reader, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Daily News, and now the DVD reviewwer for the New York Times. This is from his new web site, Dave Kehr.com. (I'll add that, based on the clips I've seen on TV and in theaters, there's something off-kilter, again IMO, about the way Kong moves, especially in NYC -- there's a rubbery-reboundish feel to him whenever he or any part of him that's attached to a surface changes directions; it's like he's a creature in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.) Kehr: There are few if any surprises in “King Kong,” Peter Jackson’s affectionate but reductive remake of the 1933 film that has long since taken up residence in the nation’s subconscious. Like far too many recent remakes of older horror films, like the Michael Bay-produced, music-video remounting of Tobe Hooper’s down-and-dirty “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (not to mention Bay’s own “The Island,” with its purely coincidental resemblances to Robert S. Fiveson’s 1979 “The Clonus Horror”), Jackson’s film invests wads of money and expends vast technical expertise in trying to be more “polished” and “professional” than the original films, and in so doing extinguishes the uncontrolled, unpolished and sometimes suicidally unprofessional impulses that motivated their making in the first place. Rather than the fecund, poetically messy metaphor that was King Kong in his first screen incarnation, Jackson’s giant ape is a tidy, compartmentalized creature, stripped of the sexuality and rage that he displayed in the Cooper-Schoedsack film and reduced to an ultimately pathetic figure, a lovable plush toy who no longer chomps his human victims in his mighty jaws or grinds them beneath his massive feet but, at worst, tosses them aside rather carelessly when he’s done playing with them (Jackson doesn’t even show these hurled bodies hitting the ground, allowing the viewer to assume that they bounce back to life like so many Yosemite Sam’s in a Warner Brothers cartoon). He’s allowed to do very little that might jeopardize the audience’s sympathy for him – which, of course, renders him as bland and placid as Barney the Dinosaur. The rich ambivalence of the Kong character – at once childlike and savage, innocent and blindly destructive, as ultimately inexplicable and pre-moral in his actions as nature itself – has been replaced by the sentimentality of a PETA brochure, in which Kong becomes the latest baby seal to be clubbed to death by greedy capitalists (now incarnated by Jack Black’s Carl Denham, a purely cynical showman rather than the far richer blend of Hollywood showman and dedicated adventurer played by Robert Armstrong in the original, as producer-director Merian C. Cooper’s engagingly candid caricature of himself). In a gesture of outright classism, the first mate (Bruce Cabot) who was the love interest of Fay Wray’s Ann Darrow has now been replaced by a successful Broadway playwright (played by Adrian Brody as a very slight variation on John Turturro’s Barton Fink). These days, we cannot have our heroines falling for unassuming blue collar types: nothing more than the toast of the town will do (although the character, Jack Driscoll, is allowed to keep his original name). Jackson has accomplished the seemingly impossible – he’s made a de-Freudianized “King Kong,” in which the mighty rivers of sexual desire (equated by Hollywood, then as now, with the “primitivism” of invented native cultures) have been diverted into tiny rivulets. Kong is no longer linked to Ann (and she by him) by the erotic tensions that run unspeakably but unmistakably between them, but because he finds her an amusing novelty. An unemployed dancer in this version, Ann executes a few soft-shoe routines for her new jungle companion, who finds them eye-rolllingly corny (has he been hanging out in Skull Island’s vaudeville houses?) but diverting enough to keep her around. The brilliant character touches of the original Kong’s stop-motion animator, Willis O’Brien, have been largely eliminated: no longer does Kong delicately peel off Ann’s peignoir and explore her body – and certainly, no longer does he sniff his fingers afterward. This is a PG Kong, ready for the merchandizing racks. Yet, for all of Kong’s boosted lovability factor, he arouses less sympathy in the audience than the rip-snorting original. About the only genuinely engaging character moment – when Kong works the broken-jaws of a dinosaur he has just dispatched, wondering why they don’t work anymore – is a direct lift from Willis O’Brien. And while the motion capture technology used to transform the actor Andy Serkis into a 25-foot-tall primate is impressively smooth and realistic, it can’t beat O’Brien’s consistently inventive and expressive gestures. Serkis provides a depressive, Prozac-ready Kong, content to sit on ledges of mountaintops or skyscrapers and brood over the injustices of fate. Back in New York, Kong’s martyrdom at the hands of the civilized world is played out with a length and attention to grisly detail that finds its only rival in Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ.” Pathos seems Jackson’s only end in these scenes, as the giant ape is reduced to a tiny speck clambering up the Empire State Building, and taking a futile last stand at its top (again, a couple of pedestrians are flicked away as Kong rampages through Times Square, but there is nothing like the horror of Kong plucking a likely-looking blonde from a hotel room, realizing that she is not his lady love, and pitching her off into the darkness – as the camera follows her screaming descent to the pavement). The CGI evocation of 1933 Manhattan is, on the other hand, quite stunning, perhaps even too much so – it is hard to pay attention to the foreground mayhem when the background is filled with such detailed recreations of lost architectural treasures and art deco signage. As the old saying runs, everyone kills the thing he loves. And while Peter Jackson hasn’t quite snuffed out the life in “King Kong” – the movie, he says, that inspired him to become a filmmaker – he’s definitely reduced its oxygen supply.

Just got around to reading Crouch's Pryor piece. "The vulgarity of his material, and the idea a 'real' black person was a foul-mouthed type was his greatest influence." Please! Pryor's greatest influence, or greatest impact, was that he said/performed things that were at best tremendously funny because they were also tremendously, touchingly real. I think it was our host, Jim A., who mentioned one of the classic and most typical moments: The dog who pensively says of Pryor's (deceased, right?) pet monkey, "And I was gonna eat him too." I wonder how many of Pryor's great moments involved something like that -- the intervention of literal or figurative other voices -- human, animal, demonic, etc. who engage in sly dialgoue with our beleaguered comic hero. And the literal voice that Pryor came up with for that dog, or for Mudbone, or Lord knows how many other beings!

Just got around to reading Crouch's Pryor piece. "The vulgarity of his material, and the idea a 'real' black person was a foul-mouthed type was his greatest influence." Please! Pryor's greatest influence, or greatest impact, was that he said/performed things that were at best tremendously funny because they were also tremendously, touchingly real. I think it was our host, Jim A., who mentioned one of the classic and most typical moments: The dog who pensively says of Pryor's (deceased, right?) pet monkey, "And I was gonna eat him too." I wonder how many of Pryor's great moments involved something like that -- the intervention of literal or figurative other voices -- human, animal, demonic, etc. who engage in sly dialgoue with our beleaguered comic hero. And the literal voice that Pryor came up with for that dog, or for Mudbone, or Lord knows how many other beings!

So who is this Rev. Katz? About "Expression" (the piece itself), I believe that it and "Ogunde" (both rec. 3/17/67) and "Number One" (rec. 3/7/67) are the only pieces recorded after the "Interstellar Space" date (2/22/67). Assuming, as Jim does (and I do too), that the "Interstellar Space" date was a watershed or a moment on the mountain top for Trane, that leaves AKAIK only the three pieces mentioned above as evidence of how he might have moved on from there. I haven't re-listened to "Ogunde" yet, but both "Expression" and "Number One" seem to combine some "Intersteller Space"-like playing with the way Coltrane, Alice C., J. Garrison, and R. Ali played on most of the 2/15/67 date that's been issued as "Stellar Regions" -- many of those pieces showing, or beginning with, what annotator David Wild calls "a dirge-like quality." Over this (or after this) "Stellar Regions"-date feel, in his second solo on "Expression," Coltrane gets into "Interstellar Space"-like playing with a good deal of intensity -- there's less of this (and at a lower level of intensity IMO) on "Number One." Also IMO, Alice C.'s slow-cycling washes of piano are no help at all on these pieces, especially at these moments; she's more in tune with what's going on during the "Stellar Regions" date. Possibly important footnotes: I think a preview of what happens on "Interstellar Space" (see Jim S.'s descriptions above, particularly his account of how Trane might have responded to Ayler) can be heard on the last piece recorded during the "Stellar Regions" date, "Tranesonic." Also, though the liner notes don't mention this, Lewis Porter's excellent Coltrane biography says (and one's ears confirm it) that Coltrane plays alto on both takes of "Tranesonic." Listening to the results, and with "Interstellar Space" in mind, I think switching from tenor to alto here might have been liberating in a fairly specific way -- removing some familar patterns from the drawing board and/or making it a bit harder to summon them up.

I drop by the JRM about once a week, and you're not overglorifying it. Maybe there's a store somewhere else in the world today that's its equal or superior, but if so I'd be surprised.

As did the Arsenio Hall Singers.

Well, they could have reproduced the notes from the 1989 LP reissue ... by Stanley Crouch. Mr. C's ringing first sentence is: "Though no musician since 1945 has dominated the jazz scene with quite the overwhelming impact of Charlie Parker, it also is true that no single artist after the great alto saxophonist has been more important to the development of fresh form in jazz than Ahmad Jamal." We later learn that "The cues that Wynton Marsalis applies are rooted in Jamal..." And while it may or may not have been Mr. C's goof, this is nice: "Jamal rarely missed an opportunity to make the most of what each of his players could do, and the results brought qualities of group sound that were as impressive as those achieved by George Kirby's classic sextet." The Godfrey Cambridge Trio had a good sound too.

We're lucky you're here.