Larry Kart

P.S. Andy Fusco also was an offensive lineman at Syracuse U. and went on to play, for a few seasons, for the New York Jets. As someone once said to him, "You're probably the only guy ever to line up against Penn State who also knows the changes to 'Stablemates.'"

There's a later Contemporary, from the mid-'60s as I recall, with Bobby Hutcherson, Elvin Jones, and bassist Chuck Domanico, that's damn good; Kessel perhaps surprisingly is right at home with Elvin, who is very well recorded -- don't recall many dates that gave me a better sense of where every piece of his kit was spatially. Always liked that early Contemporary "To Swing or Not To Swing," the one with some quartet tracks and others with Harry Edison (I think) and George Auld. Too bad that Auld made so few jazz dates (maybe any dates) in later years; he was a swinger.

Aram Shelton, age 29 -- a native of Jacksonville, Fla., who this fall left Chicago, where he's been living since 1999, to study at Mills College in the San Francisco area. He's got several albums out -- with the groups Dragons 1976 (with bassist Jason Ajemian and drummer Tim Daisy), Arrive (with vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, bassist Jason Roebke, and Daisy), and Grey Ghost (with drummer Johnathan Crawford; here both Shelton and Crawford modify with electronics what they play in real time). No "mainstreamer," Shelton has impressed me a lot. He began with Ornette but is his own man, has a personal flexible-expressive sound and control of timbres within it, a mature sense of pace and is a storyteller. I just hope that SF and what he's doing there (he's on a scholarship to do stuff with electronics) doesn't mess him up.

Andy Fusco, likewise. It tickles me to hear how much he resembles the late Gene Quill at times -- in part because I don't knew if Fusco ever paid any attention to him or even herad him at all. Jackie McLean is Fusco's more obvious inspiration, but, from a rhythmic point of view, the way Fusco can sound like he's tapdancing on top of a skateboard is very Quill-like.

He may be a bit over the age line, but I like Billy Drewes.

David -- Metaphysical bookstore in Chicago was the last I heard. The fellow who's trying to put out those Joe Daley Trio tapes, John Corbett, said that he'd spoken to Russell within the last year, and he mentioned my name. I should look him up. BTW, I also have a cassette of Russell playing cello to some electronic tape music he created -- this from the late '70s, I think -- but he and the music were well on their way to metaphysical land. I'll listen again when I get a chance. Also, two more Chicago-area stalwarts -- pianist Bob Wright and clarinetist Frank Chace. Bob made an excellent cassette of rags and stride pieces in his living room that ragtime guru Terry Waldo put out some years ago, and there are some fabulous live tapes of Bob -- with Chace, trumpeter Nappy Trottier, and drummer Wayne Jones -- that have been floating around for years. Bob BTW was not a Trad player exclusively, if at all -- he came up with Denny Zeitlin and, like early Zeitlin, had made a personal amalgamation of Tristano and Powell, with a strong admixture of Monk in Bob's case. Also, FWIW Bob could play Tristano's "Turkish Mambo" all by himself -- a party piece. He had to stop playing about 10 years ago, though -- arthritis, I believe. Frank is straight out of Pee Wee Russell, but he invents within that universe with startling power and individuality -- a utterly in-the-moment improviser. His second favorite player is sheets of sound Coltrane, and that's in there too. He's recorded some, only in traditional jazz settings, and I don't know of anything that captures him at his best. I have a tape I made in the late '60s or early '70s of Bob and Frank rehearsing, just the two of them, that's a gem -- standards, Duke's "Warm Valley," Trane's "Lazybird," "If You Could See Me Now," and another Dameron tune.

Bassist Russell Thorne. Only album I know of that he's on is "The Joe Daley Trio"(RCA), with Daley and Hal Russell, though live performances by that band have been in the process of emerging for some time ("for some time" because, I believe, of sound quality and rights considerations). Tenor saxophonist Nicky Hill. Tenor saxophonist Fred Schwartz, who never recorded AFAIK. Pianist Christopher Gaddy.

Maybe they should have said "The Complete Mainstream Felsted Recordings." In the real world, Mosaic's plan makes perfect sense because there's not likely to be a big overlap between fans of the Swing Era-style dates that Dance produced and "The Connection" date.

BTW, I'm aware that there are actual or potential trade-offs involved when you use those "modern" rhythm section players like Tommy Flanagan in such contexts. An on-form Sir Charles Thompson, for instance, would be preferable IMO, depending on who else was in the studio with him. The thing is, you still need to use your ears when you're producing a record with the Gods of Your Youth (perhaps especially so in such cases), and I'm not sure that Dance was doing that well enough pr often enough. I know Chuck likes the Felsteds more than I do, but to me he's a perfect example of a producer-listener who, to adapt a phrase that I recently ran across, "never hears what is not there." (FWIW, the original phrase comes from D.R. Shackelton-Bailey's -- a great Brit name, no? -- biography of Cicero. S-B writes: "What Cicero's volatile mentality could never have found congenial was Caesar's core of adamant. The austerity and authority of Caesar's literary style he could appreciate, for all its unlikeness to his own; but the presence of the man who never saw what was not there made him uncomfortable.")

I have (or have listened to at one time) most of the Felsted series (but not the Buster Bailey), and my memory is that only one of them, "The High and Mighty Hawk," and odd parts of others (Hines' "Brussel's Hustle") are at the level they perhaps could have/should have been. Much of this seems to have been the result of Dance's being more deferential and less-toughminded than he needed to be in the studio and/or in judging which of these vets were now playing at a high enough level so as not to drag down colleagues who were still at or close to their best (judging by the results, Dance's Brit mainstream compatriot Albert McCarthy of Jazz Monthly had the same problem on the records he produced at the time with Swing Era vets). Also, I believe that Dance's and McCarthy's goals were a bit "let's bring back the good old days" revivalistic, which failed to take account of the fact that some of the players they had assembled (e.g. Budd Johnson) no longer were as drenched in the sensibility of, say, 1937 as the producers thought or wished they were. There's not a whiff of that on "The High and Might Hawk" though, nor is there, by and large, on the Prestige Swingville albums that were being made around that time with some of the same players. I think the track record at Prestige Swingville was much higher (compare the Felsted and Swingville Budd Johnsons, for example). In particular, I recall few if any Swingville rhythm sections that weren't just fine or even better (often with judicious insertions of simpatico near or actual "modernists" -- e.g. Wendell Marshall, Tommy Flanagan, Ray Bryant -- who were then making a lot of record dates), while a fair number of Felsted rhythm sections were a bit ramshackle in execution at times.

Doh! How could I have forgotten BOTH of those "Barry's Tune" recordings.

I "garee"? Must be lysdexic.

Quasimado -- As a former editor, perhaps I'm more sensitive to such things. My wife often tells me to shut-up when I pounce on typos and other errors in the morning paper. I garee that the Reich material had to be there -- it's essential to who Ind is. BTW, do you have the album Ind made on his label of just solo walking bass lines? It's one of the great examples, I think of how harmony can become rhythm and vice versa. That is, Ind's time is great, but one of the reasons the lines swing so much is the way the pitches he chooses tug one way or another within the harmonic flow (or as like to think of it, the gravitational field) -- a harmonic flow that, of course, Ind's own lines are creating. It's like Bach -- or Jimmy Raney. BTW, from that point of view, it's sad to me that Ind in his book is so dead set against the so-called avant-garde. While I can understand why that would be so in generational terms and in terms of some aspects of musical style (his own and that of some avant-gardists), I would think that Ind would be perfectly well-attuned to hearing the way Ornette, for one, can at once create his own harmonic flow and work meaningful variations upon it.

Quasimodo -- I don't understand. Didn't you think the book could have benefited from better editing and proof-reading? Don't you find it odd that Ind thinks of Mingus's music as being among the more "commercial aspects" of jazz? (BTW, my "My God" after Ind's account of "Turkish Mambo" was not intended to be the least bit ironic -- it was said in awe, primarily of what Tristano had created here, of course, but also of Ind's ability to accurately and clearly describe the complexities of "Turkish Mambo.") Finally, I agree that Ind does speak eloquently about "the importance of really internalizing the 'harmonic flow,'" but this is a theme that other Tristano students (Marsh, Konitz, Ted Brown) have addressed before. As for Ind's portrait of Tristano the man (which jibes with the accounts of many other insiders) versus that of John LaPorta (which Allen Lowe mentioned, and which jibes with the response to Tristano of a good many other people who had significant contact with Tristano but eventually distanced themselves from the inner circle) --first, I have no direct experience of Tristano the man myself; second, LaPorta's book makes it clear that he himself could be quite an odd customer ("imperfectly socialized," to use a phrase that used to be thrown around a lot in the '50s). Thus, while I trust that LaPorta's verbatim accounts of his static-filled lessons with Tristano are just that, verbatim (LaPorta, for one, does not seem to me to be a man who would or even could make such dialogue), that very same (unsocialized, if you will) aggressively literal strain in LaPorta's personality makes his run-ins with Tristano's intransigence (however aesthetically accurate or pedagogically well-intended Tristano's remarks might have been) read like a head-butting contest between two billy goats, with LaPorta being too naive (though "naive" is not quite the right term) to grasp that he ought to bow his head and retire.

Here's an e-mail I sent the other day to Eunmi Shim, whose Ph.D. on Tristano is in the procves of being published as a trade book by the U. of Michigan Press: Just read the Peter Ind book, which is very interesting, as you might expect, but marred IMO by intimations that Ind could be a bit hare-brained in some regards -- he was, as were some others in Tristano's circle, and still is a great admirer of Wilhelm Reich (he of the orgone box), and Ind cryptically states that like Reich (or so Reich claimed) he can (among other things) use Reichian principles or techniques to influence the weather with his mind (especially useful, I suppose, if one lives in Great Britain part of the time, as Ind does); Ind also is enamored of the crackpot theories of Immanuel Velikovsky (author of "When Worlds Collide"). I think you would find Ind's account of "Turkish Mambo" to be of particular interest; he says that the piece has "no orthodox time signature at all," that "the metronome beating quarter-note rhythm is merely the co-ordinator" and "you can choose according to what rhythm you hear as predominant and what kind of time signature you accept. If you regard the metronome as beating quarter notes, the other superimposed rhythms are all based on eighth notes. The rhythms are introduced one at a time, the first being a continuous phrase of seven eighth notes. Because these repeated phrases are set over the steady metronome beat of quarter notes, the do not convey a primary time signature of seven but only a subsidiary time rolling over the quarter note metronome beat. then a new rhythm is introduced, that of a 5/8 phrase. Once this is established, a third rhythm is added -- this is of a twelve eighth-note phrase. As jazzmen relate easiest to a 4/4 rhythm, it is usually heard by them as though the metronome is beating 4/4 time. But hearing it this way is arbitrary. What is not arbitrary are the eighth-note phrases set over or against a steady quarter-note metronome. But this still does not mandate a time signature, as we know it. The final addition of a bluesy-type right hand improvisation does give a final indication of 4/4 time, but this is just implied by the kind of phrases played by Lennie.... If we take the arbitrary 4/4 as a basic time signature, exact repetition of the interlocking phrases occurs only after 105 bars." My God. I wish the book had been dealt with by a decent editor and proofreader -- lots of nagging typos and some odd assertions. For instance, here's a two-for-one shot. Writing of Nesuhi Ertegun's (of Atlantic Records) relationship with Tristano, Ind writes: "By the late fifties Nesuhi's enthusiasm for Lennie's music had waned, and he was then involved with more commercial aspects of jazz, such as the music of Ray Charles, Chris Connors [sic], and Charles Mingus." Yeah -- Mingus, that old chart-topper. On the whole, though, it's a very worthwhile book for anyone who is interested in Tristano.

Someone said this on the 'Net a few years ago: "Guitar in the Wind" (Decca, DL9200), the only LP recorded under [Galbraith's] own name, is fabulous, but long out of print.

Here's a link to Galbraith info http://www.classicjazzguitar.com/artists/a...e.jsp?artist=14 including a partial discography (a full one would be immense; he appeared on almost as many records in the '50s in NYC as Milt Hinton). The Epic album I was thinking of is "The Rhythm Section," with, I think, Hank Jones, Hinton, Osie Johnson, and Freddie Green on rhythm guitar. My guess is that Galbraith doesn't stretch out as much there as he does on the Bert album I mentioned -- my vague recollection is that the Epic was one of those LPs with 12 tracks, none of which ran longer than three or so minutes. In fact, that's probably why I didn't but it at the time -- though I certainly would now.

While Galbraith is an essential part of the Russell "Jazz Workshop" album -- the prominent guitar part is written with him in mind and may have been shaped by Galbraith in the course of extensive woodshedding with Russell -- I don't recall that Galbraith actually takes an improvised solo there; if he does, it sounds like he's slightly modifying ideas that Russell's writing already has proposed. He is similiarly prominent in the ensemble (though again without taking an improvised solo, as I recall) on John Benson Brooks' excellent "Alabama Concerto" (OJC), with Cannonball Adderley, Art Farmer, and Milt Hinton, no drummer -- Brooks and Russell being close associates. In fact, aside from a quartet album of his own on Epic or RCA that I've never heard (maybe there were two, one on each label), the album I know on which Galbraith can be heard most prominently as a, so to speak, blowing soloist is one that I made a tape of not too long age for Nate D. -- Eddie Bert's "I Hear Music, Modern Music," a Fresh Sound reissue, with Vinnie Dean alternating with Jerome Richardson, Hank Jones, Galbraith, Oscar Pettiford, and Osie Johnson. Good stuff. Galbraith comes through as a very nice player, though not in the class of, say, Jimmy Raney, nor does he strike me as being as much of an individualist as Billy Bauer -- to pick a guitarist of similarly reserved temperament. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that Galbraith had worked out a highly personal and striking way of getting around the instrument harmonically, and he was terrific technically, though not flashy.

In a section (check out "Liberian Suite" for example, and his work with Charlie Barnet), Killian was among the most striking high-note specialists there ever was -- no blare, no wobble, no sense of shrieking; instead something akin to a needle-sharp laser beam that could cut through steel, concrete, Kryptonite, you name it. He was special. As Andre Hodier once wrote, I believe, Killian's high-note work conveyed "an exacerbation of the senses."

Garth -- Thanks for the kind words, but it's Allen Lowe who was contemplating writing (in fact, may have done a fair amount of work on) a book on the more experimental stuff of the Fifties. As I recall, he could find no publisher interested in the project at that time, and proceeded to put it back on the shelf. I know the feeling, having once (in about 1981) proposed writing a book on hip comedy -- a subject that I think I was well-qualified to deal with for several reasons, among them that in the course of covering the comedy scene on a regular basis as a journalist I'd been able to interview just about all the notable surviving figures from the '50s and '60s. Sheldon Meyer at Oxford University Press was interested in the project (in part because I had Martin Williams in my corner) but then told me that the marketing department had shot it down, saying that they didn't believe that a book on this subject would sell. A few years down the road, at the height of the stand-up comedy boom, the subject arose again when I got a feeler from another publisher. I quickly hooked up with an agent (a very unwise move this turned out to be), took a month off from work and wrote a sample chapter about Mort Sahl that was exactly how I wanted it and the rest of the book to be -- analytical in tone but not, so it seemed to me, in an off-puttingly dense manner and aware of the human and professional realities involved, which is more or less the way I've tried to write about jazz. My agent, with whom I'd signed an exclusive year-long contract, said, No -- that a book on this subject had to be a series of personality profiles, and she refused to send what I'd written to the publisher. At that point I said to myself, This is it not meant to be.

Kalo -- I'd recommend Amazon or Barnes & Noble online, whichever is cheaper, because that way it gets recorded in the publisher's coffers as a book sold, but if that's inconvenient, I still have a few copies, and you can buy one from me, for the same price you could at Amazon or Barnes & Noble online, whichever is cheaper, plus shipping. If you want to go that route, send me a personal message with your address, and we can work out the particulars.

Spontooneous -- I like that recording of the Octet too (it's one of my favorite Stravinsky works -- he says it came to him, in part, in a dream, and I can believe it), but if you can, check out the 1954 recording that's on "Stravinsky Conducts, The Mono Years, 1952-1955," with Robert Nagel and Ted Weis on trumpet, Erwin Price and Richard Hixson on trombone, Julius Baker on flute, David Oppenheim on clarinet, and Loren Glickman and Sylvia Deutscher on bassoon. It's almost the same lineup as the stereo recording (which has a new flutist, trombonist and bassoonist), but IMO the mono version is light's out.

I've now listened as hard as I can to the versions of Ebony Concerto I have -- the Columbia Herman studio recording from 1946, Stravinsky's with Benny Goodman on Columbia from about 1970, and Boulez's with the Ensemble Intercontemporain from 1980 on DG. All three are available on CD. First, I disagree that Ebony Concerto is minor Stravinsky if that's meant to mean that the score had less than his full attention; seems to me that it's built like the proverbial brick shithouse -- remarkably potent in the meaningful gestures per unit of time, bang for the buck sense. Second, while the Columbia Herman gets some timbral moments just right (more about that later on), it's very slack and untogether at times. In that respect, the Boulez is just amazing -- by contrast with the Columbia Herman and Stravinsky-Goodman recordings (which suffers from a too-wide stereo spread, and sound that is at times too-highlighted and too-juicy), the Boulez gives us an utterly knit-together Ebony Concerto in which one seems to hear about 30 percent more music at any moment. For example, listen in the first movement of the Boulez to the clearly (and crucially, for the meaning of the piece) differentiated guitar and harp parts. In the Columbia Herman, you get some harp but no guitar; in the Stravinsky-Goodman you get much more harp but in such a swimmy acoustic that the guitar is virtually swallowed up inside the harp. On the other hand, I'm sad to say, Boulez shies away at a few points, one of them crucial, from the timbres that Stravinsky clearly had in mind. Listen, for example, to the terrific leering first trumpet interacting with the sleazy trombone in the con moto episode of the final movement on the Goodman-Stravinsky and the way that same fine trumpet player (who is he? anyone know?) handles his solo in the first movement. In the Boulez, the trumpeter is pretty good in the first movement solo but quite reined-in in the trumpet-trombone passage in movement three -- no lears or blares for Boulez, it seems, but that's what Stravinsky wanted. (Pete Candoli, on the Herman Columbia either has no clue or was too caught up in getting the part right note-wise to go for the colors here.) More important, there's the piece's final chords -- in which, to quote Eric Walter White's "Stravinsky," "the saxophones and trombones [move] slowly through a barrage of sound produced by the French horn playing flutter-tongued and the five muted trumpets playing harmonics tremolo...." These timbres are just as White describes them on the Herman Columbia and the Stravinsky-Goodman versions (and with S. conducting both times, I think we can assume that this is what he wanted to hear), and the effect, at once scary-weird and oddly healing (and perhaps related to the brass "raspberries" on one of the Herman recordings that S. supposedly had heard, "Bijou") is, as several commentators on the work have said, that of an "apotheosis." On the Boulez recording, though, one hears no such thing -- the trumpets are down in the mix compared to the saxophones, and I hear virtually no harmonics from them played tremolo at all; at that point it's all clean, no dirt. What a drag. What the hell was Boulez thinking? But I'll still hold on to the Boulez for all its virtues (haven't mentioned his clarinetist, Michel Arrignon, who is superb) and then play the Goodman-Herman right afterwards each time in the hope that I can mentally cobble them together. BTW, in Ira Gitler's "Swing To Bop," pp. 192-3, there's a contrarian account from Neal Hefti of how Ebony Concerto came to be commissioned and written. Hefti says that he and Pete Candoli were big Stravinsky fans, and that when Hefti had left the band to spend six months in California and then returned to the band, Candoli asked him if he had met Stravinsky while he was out there. Hefti said "sure" (he hadn't though) and added, "I played him the [Herman band's] records,and he thinks they're great." That, Hefti continues, "got back to Woody, and Woody went to Lou Levy [a music publisher, not the pianist] who was the publisher then of a lot of Stravinsky's works and a lot of Woody Herman's works, and that led it in.... [stravinsky] probably never even heard the band until Lou Levy got in touch with him." Finally, Stravinsky's use of the flugelhorn in Threni came about because he had heard Shorty Rogers play the instrument, either on record or in an L.A. club, and been drawn to the sound because (says E. W. White) "it remainded him of the keyed bugles he had wanted to write for in Les Noces.

Paul -- I heard one of those Stoltzman-Herman tour Ebony Concerto performances, at Orchestra Hall in Chicago, I beleive, but certainly in some Chicago concert forum.

Several things about Ebony Concerto. On the Everest recording, the clarinet part is played (uncredited) by John LaPorta, according to LaPorta's autobiography "Playing It By Ear" (Cadence). Also, Ebony Concerto is not a jazz work; to judge it on the basis of whether it has or lacks "jazz content" is going to deflect you from hearing how it goes about its business. The same is true of Stravinsky's Ragtime and his Piano Rag-Music versus actual ragtime pieces. As Pieter C. van den Troon says in his "The Music of Igor Stravinsky" (Yale), "From Petroushka onward...Stravinsky remained aloof, strangely unaffected by the music of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. Even the early jazz influence ... seems almost incidental when supposedly most conspicious (e.g in Histoire du soldat, Ragtime, and Piano Rag-Music), on in the later Ebony Concerto, so distorted, so completely enveloped is this 'influence' by accomodation" (i.e. by S.'s drive to accomodate "certain, practices, conventions, or idiosyncracies" of other musical traditions to the "consistency, identity, and distinction of his own music." Finally, while I haven't listened to it in some time, I recall that the most effective recorded performance of Ebony Concerto was Boulez's on DG (on LP, don't know if it's made it to CD). I would think that jazz musicians will always find this music too damn awkward, too alien to the idiom. But, again, it's not a piece in and of the idiom.