Larry Kart

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.

Studs Terkel is gay?

It was 11 out of 12 in the playoffs, 16 out of the last 17 games they played.

My wife reminds me that my previous post was imprecise. What Pierzynski actually said to Blum in the dugout in the 14th inning Tuesday night was: "Mr. Fatty's hungry. Let's end this thing so we can polish off the spread." Definitely better than "Let's get this thing over..." IMO.

Should have posted this yesterday, but according to Geoff Blum (interviewed Wednesday morning on Chicago sports radio), these were the inspirational words that A.J. Pierzynski spoke to him in the dugout before Blum went to bat in the 14th inning Tuesday night: "Mr. Fatty's hungry. Let's get this thing over so we can polish off the spread."

Man, that was a tough series -- so much so that I felt almost no sense of fun (as I did fairly often when were playing the Red Sox and Angels) until almost the very end, specifically the last two plays that Uribe made. That guy is incredibly loose! To dive into the stands like that is one thing (and not everyone would -- as in would for real, not for show), but to do that and do it successfully calls for a rare combination of let-it-all-hang-out effort and, again, tremendous looseness. Uribe also stands for how many guys on this team made genuine and to some degree unexpected or unlikely contributions. The rejuvenation of Crede (lots of Sox fans were calling for his head well beyond mid-season); the incredible turnaround of Contreras at mid-season, at a point when it seemed likely that he'd be dropped from the rotation; the return of El Duque, with his huge relief stints against the Red Sox and last night the Astros; Willie Harris, another semi-lost soul (sent down to the minors at one point this year), getting that hit tonight and scoring the winning run; Blum's homer the night before; hell, even Mr. Gasoline on the Fire Marte did some effective, if scary, pitching on Tuesday. I really can't think of a single player on the roster who didn't do something big this year at some time. And don't forget Frank Thomas, who had about three weeks in mid-season where he virtually carried the team at just the point when almost everyone else suddenly stopped hitting. Without that boost, I think the Sox would have been at or below .500 during that stretch, but Frank kept them airborne there, and when he then screwed up his foot and was lost for the rest of the season, we had enough of a lead to carry us through that mad rush from the Indians. And don't forget Dustin Hermanson, who not only was a great closer until his back acted up in August but who also had to take over the closer role early in the year from the ineffective (and eventually discarded) Shingo Takatsu. Hey, even rookie outfielder Brian Anderson, not on the playoff roster, won at least one game for us with a big hit during the Indians' final onslaught.

Further thoughts on A.J.'s balls, in a different sense. An angry, troubled man, no doubt, but as Sox TV broadcaster Hawk Harrelson said many times during the season, "A.J. puts down some great numbers" -- this being baseball-ese for A.J.'s guts and smarts in calling pitches, in particular his penchant for doubling-up or even more on a pitch that's just worked rather than doing the more normal thing and, say, following a fastball strike on the inside corner with a slider away. Seldom was this more apparent than last night in the seventh inning, with one out, a man on second and the Sox leading by a run, when A.J. had Garland through six (six!) consecutive change-ups to Bagwell (who popped out) and Biggio before Biggio struck out on the seventh pitch in the sequence, a fastball. The thing is, if either Bagwell or Biggio had guessed that the next pitch that was going to be the same semi-lollipop one they'd just seen, they probably could have killed it. Yes, Garland still had to throw those pitches, but I think few catchers would have had the guts to call them. Now that I think of it, this may be related to a possible element in A.J.'s personality -- that he's aligned along the axis of rage and humilation, and thus has a taste for, and uncommon insights into, getting opponents to defeat themselves. Actually, I believe I've read that A.J. was harshly disciplined as a kid by an angry, domineering father, which is good way, if you don't go nuts first (or even if you do), to learn how to deviously turn the strengths of the strong into potential weakness.

Chapter and verse about the A.J. incident, from a column by Bruce Jenkins in the San Francisco Chronicle: One of those now-it-can-be-told stories the White Sox, A.J. Pierzynski's new employer, surely haven't heard: During a Giants exhibition game last spring, Pierzynski took a shot to his, shall we say, private parts. Trainer Stan Conte rushed to the scene, placed his hands on Pierzynski's shoulders in a reassuring way, and asked how it felt. "Like this," said Pierzynski, viciously delivering a knee to Conte's groin. It was a real test of professionalism for the enraged Conte, who vowed to ignore Pierzynski for the rest of the season until Conte realized how that would look. The incident went unreported because all of the beat writers happened to be doing in-game interviews in the clubhouse, but it was corroborated by a half-dozen eyewitnesses who could hardly believe their eyes. Said one source, as reliable as they come: "There is absolutely no doubt that it happened."

My favorite Pierzynski story, widely attested to, took place in spring training in 2004, afte he'd been traded from the Twins to the Giants. Apparently ticked off at being traded and/or just a red ass by nature, A.J. was hit in the groin by a pitched or batted ball -- don't recall if he was catching or at bat at the time. Anyway, he crumpled to the ground, the Giants trainer ran out to him, knelt down and asked A.J., "How do you feel?" or words to that effect. In reponse, A.J. kneed the trainer in the groin. A.J.'s relationship with Giants management and teammates went downhill from there.

About the closed dome versus open dome thing, discount the fact that I'm a Sox fan if you can, but I still feel that MLB is right here for several reasons (1) because the closed dome is a home park feature that can be actuated before or during a game with the literal push of a button, versus, say, built-in season-long peculiarities of a park (like moving in an outfield fence before the year starts, but of course you can't do that for a specific game or series);(2) as mentioned before, the dome is there for a practical purpose -- comfort of the crowd in a hot, humid city, protection from rain -- and should probably never be put into operation for any other reason (3) while every team has an infield and a groundskeeper who can tinker with the length of the infield grass and, I assume within narrow margins, the slope of the baselines, only a few teams play in domed stadiums; thus allowing a team to use their dome in this way would give the domed-stadium teams an unfair advantage. Finally, FWIW, there is the longstanding rumor that in the Metrodome the Twins management used to have the flow of the Met's air-conditioning blowing out toward the fences when the Twins were at bat and in toward homeplate when the visiting team was hitting.

Furthermore, on home park advantage, the Astro's park has a retractable dome, mostly because Houston gets so hot and humid during much of the season that the dome needs to be closed and the park air-conditioned. During the season, this decision (closed versus open) is made by the Astro's management, and the rule of thumb is 80 degrees fahrenheit or higher, dome is closed. However, when the dome is closed, crowd noise is vastly magnified, which is felt to be to the Astros's advantage (and in fact, their home record this year is, I think, 40-11 with the dome closed and 16-11 with the dome open). With just such matters in mind, major league baseball itself, not each team's management, decides in the World Series (and probably in the league playoffs) whether domed stadiums cab be open or closed, with MLB's rule of thumb being that the roofs of domed stadiums must be open unless inclement weather (i.e. heavy rain, a plague of frogs or locusts) will prevent the game from being played. I wonder, though, whether MLB, not the home team's groundskeeper (as is the case, I believe, during the regular season), determines how short or how shaggy the infield grass can be, which of course can have a significant effect on the outcome if one team is more oriented toward speed or toward power hitting than the other.

About AL versus NL rules, the only difference is that pitchers bat in the NL park and there is no designated hitter. That could have meaning in several ways (1) if some Houston pitchers are good hitters (both in general and because they're been at bat regularly during the NL season), while few if any Sox pitchers are good hitters (especially because they don't bat during the AL regular season); (2) if one's pitchers are poor hitters, one may be forced to remove from the game a pitcher who is pitching well (and substitute a pinch hitter for him) if the pitcher is coming to bat in a crucial situation; and (3) of one's designated hitter is a key part of one's offense but not a skilled defensive player, one either has to put him in the field and accept his defensive liabilities or put him on the bench. Thus, Carl Everett of the White Sox (their DH) will not be in the starting lineup, because if he were, he would have to play left field in place of Podsednik.

"Clutch hitting" refers to hitting successfully when the outcome of the game is on the line -- i.e. in the late innings, or in the final inning, where a hit will drive in the tying or (better) winning run. A so- called "walk-off" home run -- a la those of Podsednik in game two or Albert Pujols of the Cardinals in the next to last game of the NLCS would be good examples -- though Pujols' home run would perhaps be more an instance of hitting in the "clutch," for if he had failed, as I recall the situation, the game would have been over, while Podsednik was hitting with one out, and if he had made an out, the White Sox still could have prevailed -- either in that inning or in an inning to come. About home field advantage, that depends on many factors -- the enthusiasm of one's fans, the degree to which the home park's acoustics magnify the amount of noise the fans can make and how much of an effect, if any, all that will have on the emotions of the home and visiting teams, the peculiarities of one's home park and the degree to which one is used to them and the visiting team is not (e.g. the unsual upward slope in deep center field in Houston, plus that park's quite short fence in left field, which supposedly encourages a special sort of inside-out swing on the part of left-handed batters that is designed to bloop outside pitches over that fence -- Houston's hitters presumably would be more used to doing this (if such tactics are in fact wise; they might instead just screw you up) than the White Sox hitters would. Also, there are the supposed benefits of sleeping in one's own bed in familiar surroundings rather than staying in a hotel room.

Sorry, I've never watched that show enough to know the names of the characters. Interesting how -- or so it seems to me -- even though Jenks is faster on the gun, Oswalt seems faster. If so, could this be a matter of delivery style -- that Jenks shows the ball to the batter and the rest of us a bit sooner than Oswalt does and/or Oswalt's arm motion is more of a whip or a sling, which creates an illusion of acceleration, while most of Jenks' arm is moving almost as fast at the ball is at the point of release. Similarly, though he's not as fast as Oswalt, Freddy Garcia may be the most extreme cocked-wrist slinger of the ball I've seen since Rick Sutcliffe, at least among pitchers who are effective.

Are you baiting us Larry? ←

That was a TOUGH game. I almost lost it when Ozzie had Marte warming up in the bullpen. For you non-Sox fans, Marte's history in recent outings has been that of a "I don't dare throw a strike, now I'd better groove one" head case. Actually, that's pretty much what Don Cooper miraculously cured Contreras of in mid-season, though he reverted at times tonight, in large part because he didn't have his recent fine command. But Marte -- just shoot me.

Benny Hill? You should have seen Jencks being interviewed after the game on local TV, with his legs bare from mid-thigh down. Looked like he had a orange tattoo on the right thigh (who gets tattoos there? could it have been a joke decal? it looked a bit like the Astros' star logo), and the two legs, both incredibly thick, also looked oddly different from each other -- the right one was pale white and virtually hairless, like it had been in a cast for several months. Altogether, an even scarier looking guy in that format than he is on the mound. On the other hand, he did speak more coherently (and amiably) than a good many ballplayers.

An old post from a percussion-oriented board about Wilson on Basie's "Queer Street": "There is a fill (actually a four bar break) by Shadow Wilson playing with Count Basie on a tune called "Queer Street" that is famous among big band drummers and that Buddy Rich thought was the greatest fill he'd ever heard..."

That's some deep thinking, Jim. Hell, it's brilliant too and AFAIK unique to you. BTW, do you know Nelson's big band "suite" album for Prestige, "Afro-American Sketches"? Great stuff.

"Legrand Jazz' is something less than the sum of its parts at times, thanks to Legrand occasionally cute ideas and the bitty air of some tracks, but on the whole it's a lot of fun. Brownie -- I know what Webster said about O.P. in the "Soulville" notes (and I agree "Ill Wind" is a good one), but Ben also praised Rowles to the skies as an accompanist on more than one occasion, and my ears tell me that the Rowles, Kessel, Mondragon, Stoller rhythm section on "Sweets" is much more effective than the O.P, Ellis, Brown, Stan Levey one on "Soulville." (Actually, now that I think of it, Levey may also be a part of the problem; while his oddly minaturized ride cymbal beat can be just fine in bop or West Coast settings, with O.P. at the piano, Levey's time feel can make things (or make things seem) a bit airless. As I recall, something similar happens on that Granz Jam Session date from 1958 with Mullligan, Getz, Edison, O.P., Levey et al., the one with "Chocolate Sundae"). BTW, I'm not saying that O.P. killed every Granz session where he was part of the rhythm section in that period; for one, he certainly has a lot to do with the success of "Stan Getz and the Oscar Peterson Trio." It's just that IMO he could get very mechanical as a comper -- rhythmically and harmonically -- and when he did, that didn't help. In any case, if you know "Sweets," what do you think? Certainly, the feel of those two rhythm sections is quite different. Even more striking, compare the feel of "Sweets" to that of "Gee Baby Ain't I Good to You."