Larry Kart

Just picked up the reissued "Sweets," Thanks to the handsome remastering, I was struck more than ever by the rhythm section -- in particular the way Kessel and Rowles seem to fuse into a single comping entity, a la '30s Freddie Green and Basie. Who plays what, when between Kessel and Rowles is so perfectly, subtly apportioned, to the point where some of Kessel's figures seem to vanish into Rowles' and vice versa, that you'd almost think it all had to be worked out beforehand, though of course it wasn't; and the results are tremendously stimulating to the Edison and, especially, Webster -- who was perhaps more sensitive/vulnerable to what rhythm sections were doing behind him than Sweets was. As I'd thought, the album was recorded shortly after (9/4/56) the same group had backed Billie Holiday on two Clef dates (8/14/56 and 8/18/56), which no doubt accounts for the hand-in-glove atmosphere that prevails here. Kudos to Mondragon and Stoller too.

Niehaus may have the (pardon the expression) "whitest" rhythmic sense of any modern jazz musician whose playing arguably is excellent. An updated Frankie Trumbauer? Listen to where his accents fall and/or don't fall. At times things are almost unbelievably close to being backwards or inside out, his harmonic choices are perfectly in tune with this, and when and where the hell does he breathe? (Often he doesn't for alarmingly long stretches of time and then where you'd least expect him to.) Oddly enough, all things being equal (which they're not), there's some degree of kinship here, I think, esp. rhythmically, between Niehaus and Hank Mobley! Lord knows what a two-horn-plus-rhythm album with those two would have sounded like. I agree about the recent Fresh Sounds Niehaus albums, esp. the one with Bill Perkins and Jack Nimitz. Could be the best playing ever from the leader. On the other hand, a somewhat later live album, recorded in Las Vegas for I don't recall what label, showed a severe falling off.

Those are Burns' words Coming thro' the rye, poor body, Coming thro' the rye, She draiglet a' her petticoatie Coming thro' the rye. O, Jenny's a' wat, poor body; Jenny's seldom dry; She draiglet a' her petticoatie Coming thro' the rye. Gin a body meet a body Coming thro' the rye, Gin a body kiss a body - Need a body cry? Gin a body meet a body Coming thro' the glen, Gin a body kiss a body - Need the warld ken? but I don't know if the tune is borrowed or his. No jazz was played in my home, except by me when the time came, but the way my mother listened to classical music (mostly on the radio) when I was kid -- the way it seemed to sway her and speak to her, the way she homed in on its essence without any pretence -- was a nice living lesson.

More info: Many of the works of the celebrated Scottish poet Robert Burns were written as lyrics to be sung to existing old tunes, in an effort to preserve them. In the aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion, the English had forbidden the Scots to sing the old songs and the tunes were gradually being forgotten. Together with James Johnson, Burns endeavored to preserve these old melodies, by creating new lyrics--most often far superior poetically to the original. My Heart's in the Highlands is one outstanding example of such a practice. It was written to be sung to the tune Failte na Miosg ("The Musket Salute.") According to Burns' own notes, "The first half stanza [of the chorus] is old; the rest is mine." P.S. It's what the music does in the part of the chorus that Burns wrote (a simple but near-Schubertian move) that makes the song so potent.

Sorry, that should have been: My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here, My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer. A-chasing the wild deer, and following the roe; My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go....etc. Perfect for doing the dishes.

The Andrews Sisters recording of "On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe," from 1946 when I was four; and around the same time, my maternal grandmother, who had a lovely contralto voice, singing "My Heart's in the Mountains/My Heart Is Not Here/My Heart's in the Mountains/My Heart Is Not Here" while she did the dishes (Robert Burns words, I believe, don't know who wrote the music, maybe Burns too); and "Funiculi, Funicula," which was used as the theme song of the radio soap opera "Just Plain Bill." I decided or discovered on my own little hook that I just hated that melody, and I still can't stand it.

I've also learned (maybe even had to learn) to become undogmatic about how Webern is/can be/should be performed -- probably because I began with Robert Craft's old Columbia box of the complete works, which includes some performances that are scrappy (as Craft admits in the booklet) and others that may never be surpassed and/or carry a unique expressive charge because of the effort/passion involved in their fiercely difficult realization by those performers at that time and the corresponding sense of excitement/commitment those performers and Craft bring to the task. By contrast, both of Boulez's Webern sets struck me as icy/lacy petit-point; as I recall someone saying or writing of one of those sets, Boulez conducts Webern as though he were Ravel. That said, I like Von Dohnanyi's London disc of the orchestral music quite a bit (don't know whether it's still in print), and I'm just getting familiar with the first disc of Craft's new Webern traversal on Naxos. Comparing Von Dohnanyi's and Craft's Naxos version of the Symphony may leave you thinking that somebody here has to be way wrong -- either one of them or you (if you respond positively to both, as I do) because they're quite different, Von Dohnanyi rather gemutlich-expressive (though not at all smeary-sloppy; he's conducting the Cleveland SO), Craft a good deal more cool and dry, though I wouldn't say Craft's "cool" means "detached," not at all. Timings are interesting -- while VD's first movement is 6:47 versus Craft's 7:31, VD's arguably feels mellower/slower because of the more gemutlich phrasing; but Craft's second movement at 2:32 seems to go like a bullet versus VD's 3:03. (Craft writes that his performance of this movement "at Webern's metronomic tempi may be the first to realise the music as it was intended to be heard" -- the imperious tone being typical of Craft; in my experience, sometimes his music-making backs that up 100 per cent, sometimes it's more a matter of him getting his back up. In any case, Craft's overall 10:03 for the Symphony feels a good deal swifter than VD's overall 9:53. I know -- clock time isn't the same as music time. And so far, I still like both recordings, even though I'm sure Craft would say I'm not allowed to -- in the notes he says that the Symphony "has become the best known of Webern's twelve-tone pieces (unfortunately in poor performances)..."

If the Cohn-Brookmeyer is the one that was initially on Coral, that's an excellent record with the horns in great form, thanks in large part I think to the presence of a more aggressive, boppish rhythm section than than was the norm for them at the time -- Mose Allison, Teddy Kotick (fine Pettiford-like time and lines), and Nick Stabulus (who's more or less doing a Blakey imitation).

The guy Goold reminds me of most is vintage JR Monterose. (BTW, contrary to many sources, Monterose's first name is JR, not J.R. -- JR stands for "Junior," his given name is Frank Anthony Monterose Jr.) I don't know whether Goold has ever listened to a note of Monterose, let alone been directly influenced by him, but the writing of Goold's frequent musical partner bassist Ben Wolfe on the two albums of his own that I've heard, both featuring Goold, is eerily reminsicent of the sound and feel of several recordings -- on Bethlehem with Oscar Pettiford and other leaders, on EmArcy with various leaders and typically charts by Quincy Jones, plus other recordings that don't come to mind right now -- that emerged from an apparently shortlived mid-1950s NYC pre-hard bop scene. The music was at once neat and kind of "progressive" but ballsier than most corresponding West Coast fare of the time, and JR seems to have been related to that scene for a while (there is, or was, a CD of the Bethlehem sessions JR appeared on). Whatever, when framed by Wolfe's charts, an aspect of Goold seems to me to be revealed or at least showcased. On the other hand, being old enough to have lived through this music the first time through, its semi-recurrence these days (even if the similarities I hear are accidental or an utter mirage) gives me a queasy feeling.

Still have my somewhat beat up, purchased at the time it came out LP copy. That's a lovely rhythm section, some of the best Ben Webster on record, and the overall groove is great, as though everyone were on ball-bearings (quite a contrast in that respect to a later Granz album -- was it called "Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You"? -- with the same front-line and an utterly airless rhythm section with Oscar Peterson). Though Edison is certainly in good form on "Sweets," I think his best post-Basie work is on the live album from the Haig. BTW, the band on "Sweets" is the same one that backed Billie Holiday on two four-tune Clef dates (8/14/56 and 8/18/56).

I've heard tell -- maybe it was from you, Chuck, based on that Jazz Fest experience -- that Raney and the Tristano-ites (at least some of them, in this case Warne) were oil and water emotionally, despite the seeming likelihood that on musical terms the results might approach Nirvana. If it was an ego clash, I guess that didn't happen with Raney and Ted Brown -- but then S. Chamberlain's Warne bio records on p. 210 a semi-cruel, semi-thoughtless snub (hard to say which, or which would be worse) that Warne once directed at Ted.

Don't know if it's been mentioned here, but Raney is in top form on Ted Brown's 1985 album "In Good Company" (Criss Cross), recently re-released on CD with alternate takes. Fans of Raney's writing should check out his "Sir Felix" here, a dazzling line. Rest of the band is Hod O'Brien, Buster Williams, and Ben Riley. An RVG recording.

Same guy. I've heard the same stories about his career as a coach at King; they were rampant. Don't know what Cox is up to these days.

Nate -- Don't think I have the time or the inclination to do a personal Davie poems selection (though maybe I should; it might well be more important and stimulating than the other stuff I think I have to/need to do right now). Anyway, I'd trust Tuma, as smart as he obviously is and a deep-dyed Davie admirer to boot. Only Davie I can think of that I don't know and would like to look at because it might alter my point of view is his long version, "The Forests of Lithuanaia," of a work by Polish national poet of the 19th Cent., Mickiewicz. One thing I recall about Davie's poems is what I'd call their graceful clumsiness. That is, he's a man and a poet who fiercely resists, by and large, the least hint of lyrical afflatus (in part because he doesn't have that much of it in him to begin with, in part because what he does have of that in him is something he finds profoundly disturbing). I think there was a struggle going on in Davie along those lines, and when he managed to make a poem of it, the results not only could be powerful but also damn unlike just about any other poem that was being written by anyone else at the time.

Yes, I have read Svevo but a long time ago (thought "Zeno" was terrific). I bought the two newish translations (of "Zeno" and "Senilita") that virtually all agree improve a great deal on the old ones but haven't jumped in yet. Too many books (and records), too little time.

Late -- About who wrote the essay/review that pulled my coat to McMichael way back when, I've had no luck rustling through my memory and looking through books and magazines. Again, I thought of Donald Davie because I'm pretty sure it was a figure from a previous generation whose opinion I'd learned to respect. For info on Davie, here's a place to start http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/reframe....e&author=davied He was IMO a great (almost uniquely serious, though also at times puritanical and stuffy) critic, and at his best a fine poet. Whether you agree or not with Davie on a particular matter, he's always stimulating and usually enlightening -- a man who makes you think.

Late -- Yes, I have "The World At Large." My favorite part of "Four Good Things" -- at least it's the part that I just couldn't believe he was attempting and pulling off the first time I read it -- is the map/walking tour section at the end. BTW, did Alan Shapiro (who used to be, maybe still is, in charge of that Phoenix Poets program) pick your book for publication? He's a fine poet and a very smart, deep, nice guy. Also BTW, I was turned on to McMichael years ago (I think well before "Four Good Things") by a shrewd, enthusiastic essay/review about him from someone whose opinion I trusted (rightly as it turned out) but whose name I can't recall. It might have been Donald Davie, because I think I remember that it was someone from another, older generation, and I sure had learned to pay attention to what Davie had to say about most anything.

Actually, I found at least two -- maybe three -- interested parties over the years. And of course I'd also found enough copies of the book in used book stores to put the bright idea in my head of having more than one copy around. There's something about "Four Good Things" that makes you want to pass it on, maybe because, while it is a poem without doubt, the prose sense of it -- the sheer stuff-it-has- to-say factor -- is so strong.

Late -- I agree, McMichael's "Four Good Things" is something else. I used to keep two copies of the paperback edition around -- one for me, one to give to interested parties or parties I could interest -- but am down to just one now.

Haven’t written a poem of my own in years, but I did translate (successfully in the opinion of the man himself), the "Mottetti" of Eugenio Montale back in the early 1970s, and the translations were published in a limited edition (300 copies) by the Grabhorn-Hoyem Press, each copy signed by Montale. Because of the small size of the edition, Montale’s signature, and the cachet of Grabhorn-Hoyem in the fine-printing field -- the late Robert Grabhorn (this was the last book he worked on) and Andrew Hoyem, who now runs the Arion Press, were/are famous printers -- used copies go for about $200: http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?ac=sl&st...365565635_1:3:5 There’s also a newish book "Montale in English" (Penguin), edited by Harry Thomas, that includes my translation of Montale’s sequence "Dopo una Fuga" ("After a Flight"): http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...=glance&s=books

I do have the Paul Edwards W. Lewis book (found it used, still cost a bundle though). Haven't cracked it yet, but it looks like it will be really good. About R. Johnson, I didn't say "word soup" but "water soup" -- that is, not language (or L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E) games but stuff that seems so thin as to be without flavor. Not that I'm necessarily right about this (I'm going on old dim memories), but that's what those memories are or were (unless, God forbid, I'm confusing Johnson with someone else of his vintage). I will try to track down "Ark" and report.

Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese meal (with a Diet Coke -- who am I kidding?). Only excuse is that our nearby McD's has really cranked up the level of quality and service recently.

The level of journalistic commentary on Bellow's death has been pretty low I think, especially in the New York Times, where cultural journalism has pretty much gone ga-ga in recent years, with the exception of former Times music critic Paul Griffiths' dispatches from London. Dig this gem of pure lunacy about Bellow from Joseph Berger's piece in Thursday's Times, "A Writer Captivated By the Chaos of New York": "His publishers and his agent, Harriet Wasserman, were here, and so were his girlfriends, and he often combined business with pleasure -- or whatever pleasure a man often at war with women could take." (After such knowingness... And aside from that, only in New York did Bellow have girlfriends?) As a corrective, and a reminder of what we don't seem to have much if any of anymore, here's a piece a friend sent me that Alfred Kazin wrote about Bellow in 1965: One day in 1942 I was walking near the Brooklyn Borough Hall with a young writer just in from Chicago who was looking New York over with great detachment. In the course of some startlingly apt observations on the life in the local streets, the course of the war, the pain of Nazism, and the neurotic effects of apartment-house living on his friends in New York, observations punctuated by some very funny jokes and double entendres at which he was the first to laugh with hearty pleasure for things so well said, he talked about D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, not as great names but as fellow artists. He said, as casually as if he were in a ball park faulting a pitcher, that Fitzgerald was "weak," but Dreiser strong in the right places. He examined Hemingway's style like a surgeon pondering another surgeon's stitches. And citing D. H. Lawrence with the intimacy of a brother-in-arms, he pointed to the bilious and smoke-dirty sky and said that like Lawrence he wanted no "umbrella" between him and the essential mystery. The impression this conversation made on me was very curious. Bellow had not yet published a novel, and he was known for his stories and evident brilliance only to a small intellectual group drawn from the Partisan Review and the University of Chicago. Yet walking the unfamiliar Brooklyn streets, he seemed to be measuring the hidden strength of all things in the universe, from the grime of Brooklyn to the leading stars of the American novel, from the horror of Hitler to the mass tensions of New York. He was measuring the world's power of resistance, measuring himself as a contender. Although he was friendly, unpretentious, and funny, he was serious in a style that I had never before seen in an urban Jewish intellectual: he was going to succeed as an imaginative writer; he was pledged to grapple with unseen powers. He was going to take on more than the rest of us were. As Bellow talked, I had an image of him as a wrestler in the old Greek style, an agonist contending in the games for the prize. Life was dramatically as well as emotionally a contest to him, and nothing of the agony or contest would be spared him. God would try him in his pride and trip him up, and he knew it; no one was spared; he had been brought up an orthodox Jew, and he had a proper respect for God as the ultimate power assumed by the creation. A poor immigrant's gifted son, he had an instinct that an overwhelming number of chances would come his way, that the old poverty and cultural bareness would soon be exchanged for a multitude of temptations. So he was wary--eager, sardonic, and wary; and unlike everybody else I knew, remarkably patient in expressing himself. For a man with such a range of interests, capacities, and appetites, Bellow talked with great austerity. He addressed himself to the strength of life hidden in people, in political issues, in other writers, in mass behavior; an anthropologist by training, he liked to estimate other people's physical capacity, the thickness of their skins, the strength in their hands, the force in their chests. Describing people, he talked like a Darwinian, calculating the power of survival hidden in the species. But there was nothing idle or showy about his observations, and he did not talk for effect. His conceptions, definitions, epigrams, apercus were of a formal plainness that went right to the point and stopped. That was the victory he wanted. There was not the slightest verbal inflation in anything he said. Yet his observations were so direct and penetrating that they took on the elegance of achieved thought. When he considered something, his eyes slightly set as if studying its power to deceive him, one realized how formidable he was on topics generally exhausted by ideology or neglected by intellectuals too fine to consider them. Suddenly everything tiresomely grievous came alive in the focus of this man's unfamiliar imagination. Listening to Bellow, I became intellectually happy--an effect he was soon to have on a great many other writers of our generation. We were coming through. He was holding out for the highest place as a writer, and he would reach it. Even in 1942, two years before he published his first novel, Dangling Man, his sense of his destiny was dramatic because he was thinking in form, in the orbit of the natural storyteller, in the dimensions of natural existence. The exhilarating thing about him was that a man so penetrating and informed should be so sure of his talent for imaginative literature, for the novel, for the great modern form. We all knew brilliant intellectuals, academic conquistadores, geniuses at ideology, who demanded one's intellectual surrender. Every day I saw intellectuals clever enough to make the world over, who indeed had made the world over many times. Yet Bellow who had been brought up in the same utopianism and was himself a scholar in the formidable University of Chicago style, full of the Great Books and jokes from the Greek plays, would obviously be first and last a novelist, a storyteller, creating new myths out of himself and everyone he had ever known, fought, loved, and hated. This loosened the bonds of ideology for the rest of us. It was refreshing to be with a man who so clearly believed himself headed for power in the novel: it disposed of many pedantic distinctions.

Clem -- I've read a lot of Wyndham Lewis over the years, though not recently. What Ronald Johnson I've seen struck me as water soup. This may not be fair or accurate, but it seems to me Creeley dispensed blurbs with a very free hand, especially in later years.

Among the quintessential inside-out solos IMO, and one that reveals what the problems are (if problems there be) in that way of playing and why inside-out is not just a matter of staying more or less within a given form or departing from it but also of overall sensibility (e.g. Roscoe Mitchell never played an inside-out solo in his life, AFAIK) ... well I see this sentence has pretty much broken down, but the solo I have in mind is Joe Henderson's on "True Colors" from Freddie Hubbard's album "Blue Spirits" (Blue Note, rec. 1966). which is particularly revealing of what's at issue (or at stake) here because it very untypically moves outside-in rather than inside-out. I could, and might still, go on about this particular hobby horse but don't for some reason feel up for it right now. But check out this solo if you can. If you like it, fine -- I won't try to convince you otherwise. If it feels a bit odd (as in "implausible") to you, then you probably see the problem or see it the way I do. BTW, Bob Blumenthal's notes for the RVG issue of "Blue Spirits" say that Herbie Hancock plays piano and celeste on the two pieces from the belatedly issued "True Colors" date, but that's not a celeste; it's either a harpsichord or an electronic keyboard instrument that's been tweaked so that it sounds like a harpsichord.