Larry Kart

Lazaro -- I just don't get Vandermark as a player at all, doubt that there's much there to get. And this raises big doubts in my mind about his compositional stuff, makes me pretty sure that to the degree that it works or seems to work it's because he's got some good players working with him.

"Document Chicago" (482 Music) is worth getting, but there still is a somewhat frustrating gap between the guys who are the best IMO being able to get their best stuff on record and decently recorded. Aram Shelton's trio Dragons 1976 has made a representative album, "On Cortez"; his band Arrive, with vibraharpist Jason Adasiewicz, is in fine form on an album of the same name, and they'll have a new one on 482 Music coming soon. (The first two Sheltons are self-produced I believe and can perhaps be obtained through the Jazz Record Mart. If that doesn't work, let me know -- Shelton himself probably has copies under his bed.) Dave Rempis' trio Triage is captured well on "Twenty Minute Cliff" (Okkadisc) and another disc I think whose title escapes me; haven't yet heard his quartet album "Out of Season" (482 Music), but I bet it's at least as good. Tenor saxophonist Matt Bauder has an album on 482 Music, but while I've been impressed by him in live performance, I found this music impenetrable/aimless/pretentiously arty/you name it. Cornetist Josh Berman, tenorman Keefe Jackson, drummer Frank Rosaly, and Swiss tuba player Marc Unternaeher have a good new one coming on Delmark in March (disclaimer: I wrote the notes). Excellent altoist Matana Roberts' trio Sticks and Stones (bassist Josh Abrams, drummer Chad Taylor) has frustratingly not been captured whole on record yet, but "Shed Grace" (Thrill Jockey) comes much closer than its predecessor. (Roberts hasn't been a Chicagoan for a while, but her music is in the spirit.) Haven't yet heard the new Jeff Parker on Thrill Jockey; his Delmark trio album, "Like-Coping," is dully recorded but can be made to sound decent with a big treble boost and bass cut. The Jeb Bishop Trio album on Okkadisc captures him at his shaggy-dog best, but I think it's OOP. All in all, though, there's a lot happening in performance that hasn't made its way to disc yet.

Then, right around Tortoise/Isotope 217 time and, I believe, folding right into or out of it, there was Rob Mazurek and the Chicago Underground Duo thing. Wasn't really into that or even paying enough attention to anything around town at the time, and listening to the records later on I was interested at times though not bowled over, but it certainly cleared more ground on the arbitrariness/spaciness front. Also, Chuck, do you have in mind when Mars Williams was with Hal? Because Mars did go on to Liquid Soul, without which maybe.... Bed for me too.

Books -- but I don't collect them for their value, rarity, etc. I tell myself that I'm asembling a private library, to be used when needed to sustain a train of thought that I couldn't keep going in the right direction otherwise, and sometimes it does work that way. At least that's what I tell myself -- my wife thinks otherwise.

Yes, Chuck, in artistic-creative terms, it was Hal all the way, but my impression (and I could be wrong here) was that there was some break in continuity -- timewise and otherwise -- between Hal and his associates and what came after and what there is now. Seems to me that, for better or for worse (and leaving Vandermark out of the equation for the moment), the advent of the post-rock (is that the right term?) bands Tortoise and Isotope 217 was important, or at least symbolic of what the difference was. That is, you had, on the one hand, bands that were getting kind of jazzlike from a rock vantage point or starting place -- in part because they found rock's musical conventions boring and/or not musical enough -- while, on the other hand, you had young jazz guys for whom rock was neither the enemy, nor something to try to borrow from or "fuse" with (a la fusion music), in the name of financial gain or cultural/social/genrational rejiggering, but just part of the casual musical backdrop of their lives. In particular, I think, the Tortoise/Isotope 217 thing -- which was a natural development one, not a programmatic one -- was important, regardless of whether you think that music mattered much aesthetically, because it really cleared the decks. If the guys who were for a hot minute or two regarded as the hippest things around were almost becoming jazz bands, albeit in a reinvent the wheel way, there then was (for the younger guys I know or whose sensibilities back then I can reasonably guess at) a rapidly growing sense of permission in the air. They were free to feel new if they could make something new and good, and I think many of them have. I'm just making this up as I go along now, but I'm pretty sure that there was a genuine "free to feel new" moment for this scene, and that it was a turning point.

OK, some of the young folks on any scene probably haven't paid their dues by some standard, and I'd witnessed the performance Vandermark described, I'd be pissed too. But all the young folks I'm thinking of on this scene who seem to me to be very good have done their homework and then some, or else they couldn't make the music they do. Vandermark's organizational/promotional abilities are undeniable as far as I'm aware (though how do you separate them from those of John Corbett?), but if he is not himself a figure of significant value musically (and if he is, I've yet to hear it) isn't his centrality on the Chicago scene a bit odd? I'm not out to knock Vandermark BTW, just calling things here the way I see them and feeling uneasy about doing so in any more public forum, for the reasons I mentioned above.

Guess I'm destined (or foredoomed) to write something about the current Chicago scene in some way or other fairly soon -- I go to a fair amount of stuff, enjoy a lot of what I hear, know a fair number of the players, think I have a pretty good fix on what makes it special (and I think it is). To possible roadblocks to writing about the scene with the requisite freedom and honesty are (a) the Ken Vandermark problem and (b) the AACM problem. The Vandermark problem is that while his presence played an undeniably important role in bringing this scene into being (for example, a fair number of now-important young guys who aren't natives of the area came to Chicago from the mid-1990s on because they heard through the grapevine that there was a scene here, and that scene revolved around Vandermark), his own music just isn't very good IMO. Moreover, and this is where it gets awkward, lots of the younger guys who have benefited directly or indirectly from Vandermark's presence also don't have a high opinion of him as a player or a composer. So while this probably needs to be talked about if you're going to talk about this scene at all, how do you do this without either making a whole lot of trouble for guys who are willing to speak openly for attribution (assuming any are) or, if none are, making a whole lot of trouble for yourself and/or coming across like an "I know better" jerk (even though, again, you know that lots of the good younger players agree with you). The AACM problem is really two problems. First, with a few exceptions (Jeff Parker, bassist Josh Abrams, drummer Mike Reed, and others) the younger really good players are mostly white (not that they group together along racial lines; rather the grouping is of like-minded players, and most of them are white). In what way is this a problem? Well, not perhaps in human terms -- the communal feeling, from what I can tell, is remarkably strong, and it certainly includes the non-white guys who hear things along similiar lines. And of course Jeff Parker was something of model/mentor figure for some of the guys who are younger than he is. Second, the AACM is not what it once was. Leaving aside Ernest Dawkins (don't have enough experience of his music to spout off about it), I think that the major younger figures are the no longer so young Edward Wilkerson Jr., flutist-composer Nicole Mitchell, and reedman David Boykin -- all of whom suffer to varying degrees IMO from the fact that the first great generation of AACM figures pretty much left town 30-odd years ago and return only for brief visits. Wilkerson solved this problem for himself in the 1980s by forming Eight Bold Souls -- solved it because he's a marvelous player and composer, and he assembled a damn good (if sometimes dangerously raw or shaggy) band, though it would be hard to separate the rawness/shagginess of the players from the virtues they brought to the music. Over time, though, the band is has gotten pretty frayed -- in part because of illness and death -- to the point where it seems to me that Eight Bold Souls is not only not the band it once was but also one that, for whatever reasons (tenderhearted communal sentiment perhaps) is not going to take steps to right itself (if indeed I've described the situation accurately, and there are steps that Wilkerson could take). "If ... there are steps that Wilkerson could take" implies that there might be a problem with the pool of young AACM-associated players, and from what I can tell, there is. Corey Wilkes, for example, works with Roscoe (which certainly counts for something), and some here have been knocked out by his playing, but to me he's mostly a showboat -- and even if there's more substance behind the flash than I think there is, seems to me like Wilkes temperamentally wants to be "star," not part of a communal music-making enterprise. Boykin, on the other hand, is really good at best, but whenever I hear him I get the feeling that 1) he needs to push himself (or be pushed by others) and 2) he isn't inclined to push himself that much and is hardly ever playing with guys who are going to push him. By contrast, the North Side (for want of a better term) scene is so communally competitive (but also, as far as I can tell, remarkably low on snarkiness) that the guys there who are good tend to become better by leaps and bounds, and so far I'm not aware of anyone on that scene who's good who shows signs of settling down into "I've got this thing that's good, and that's good enough" mode. But that's what it sounds like Boykin is doing. Finally, Nicole Mitchell, who does some really nice stuff as a player and a writer, and is not complacent. But as nice as her stuff can be, nice is all that it is or ever will be I think; her music is like a really good travelogue or the best painting you ever saw at an art fair -- nothing wrong with it but not, almost by definition, major in intent or achievement. The typical Mitchell performance probably would be more successful than the typical Boykin one (as I recall he often is part of her ensemble), but I think Boykin hasn't come close to reaching his limits, while Mitchell may be at hers. Actually, Boykin reminds me a bit of Roland Kirk without the showmanship -- seems like there is a vein of jive and/or complacency there, and while you'd hope that this would burned away (as it could be with Kirk when he made music with aggressive major players), so far that isn't happening. Again, on the North Side you see players growing, self-correcting, being pushed by their peer and superiors, all the time.

Per the posts by Lazaro, Jim and others, here's a listing from last week's Chicago Reader: TOBY SUMMERFIELD For this show, Toby Summerfield, bassist in the instrumental rock outfit Crush Kill Destroy, has assembled a large band to perform a piece about what he calls the "convergence of contemporary 'jazz' or 'new music' composition and rock and ethnic pop material." That phrase doesn't go very far toward explaining what the music will sound like, but the roster of 17 musicians is promising. The usual suspects from the local improv scene, like saxophonist Aram Shelton, percussionists Frank Rosaly, Tim Daisy, Jason Adasiewicz, and Dan Sylvester, and bassists Brian Dibblee and Jason Ajemian, will be joined by a handful of visiting artists, including Antibalas reedist and former Chicagoan Stuart Bogie. --Peter Margasak I went, the place was packed with young people (as it was the following night for the same lineup at another venue, a bar called The Hungry Brain -- my wife and I were the only people there on the first night in our age group), and the music was fantastic. Here's an account I sent to a friend: "Caught a remarkable concert last night at the Open End Gallery (I think it's a gallery -- big two-and-a-half storey loft at the corner of Fulton and Damen, about four blocks north of the United Center, where the Bulls were losing to the Celtics. Main event was a semi-written, semi-conduction, 50-minute or so piece for 16 players (title "Never Enough Hope") by bassist/guitarist man-mountain (6'-5'', 270 or so, bearded) Toby Summerfield. Lineup was three-and-a-half vibraphones (Tim Daisy doubling on half-sized vibes and a snare/cymbal kit); accordion doubling on electric guitar; another electric guitar; acoustic bass; electric bass; drums; alto sax, tenor sax, two baritone saxes; violin, viola, and cello (these three, plus the acoustic bass, fairly heavily amplified). Basic setup, as the vibes sets may suggest, bore some slight relation to Steve Reichian minimalism, but the patterns weren't frozen or handled in such as to imply systemization and potential trance; rather the effect was of gallumphing, giddy rhythmic energy, over which of the typically long-lined rubato sax and string ensemble work was somewhat reminiscent of mid-to-late-'50s Mingus (e.g. "Far Wells Mill Valley," "Eclipse"). Patches of conduction-impelled free blowing by the sax section, but the only extended solo work came from San Francisco-based violinist Dina Maccabee, who played her ass off. Rest of the band was Amy Cimini (viola), Kevin Davis (cello), Brian Dibblee (bass), Aram Shelton (alto), Stuart Bogie (tenor), Daniel Bennett, Colin Stetson (both bari. sax) Jason Adasiewicz, Dan Sylvester, Tom (aka Tackett) Brown (all three on vibes), Daisy, Frank Rosaly (dms.), Joshua Tillinghast (gtr.), Nathaniel Braddock (accordion and gtr.), Jason Ajemian (el. bass). From what I heard of him warming up and in a few exposed passages, Bogie (originally from Ann Arbor, as is Summerfield, now a member of the NY-based Afrobeat band Antibalas) sound like to someone to watch. Also impressive among the players new to me (though I've heard him before on drums) who had some exposed solo passages was Tim Brown, once at Ann Arbor, now in Seattle. "Opening set was Shelton's trio Dragons 1976 (with Daisy and Ajemian). Liked them from the first but can hardly believe how much they've grown as a band (and Shelton individually) since I last heard them live (maybe three months ago). They play and rehearse together so much that everyone knows everyone else's moves (in the fruitful mind-reading sense), and Shelton, though he sounds like himself, is among the shrewdest, most genuine Ornette-affected players I've ever heard. For one thing, I think he hears each note as having a top, middle, and bottom (at the least), and he can move into (and around inside, if he wants to) each note from any of those directions -- and without anything but expressive, structural necessity/desire as a guide. Also, he's slowed down a bit at age 28 -- maybe 20 percent fewer notes, makes them all count. "The Summerfield piece was recorded the next day. If they got it right and it gets out, I'll let you know." Both groups received long ovations -- the Summerfield piece got five minutes worth on the second night, so I'm told (I wasn't there that night).

"Interesting, and somewhat ironic, as I remember Evans's wife telling me, at the time, that he had to stop using Philly Joe because of excessive substance abuse problems." Yes, but that was 20 years down the road from 1958. Also FWIW, according to Pettinger, Evans' substance of choice in 1978 was cocaine and Philly Joe's was alcohol. On the other hand, according to Pettinger again, their junky-buddy friendship persisted, to the point where one day on the road, recalls Evans' then-bassist Michael Moore, Bill and Philly Joe went to a nearby Sears store and bought for the trio three matching "horrible polyester suits -- powder blue coats, white trousers, and reversible vests (pink on one side). They decided it all -- I had nothing to do with it, except I had to wear the damn things."

Soory -- That should be Peter Pettinger, not "Pottinger."

Very interesting, Jim. That fits neatly (though perhaps too neatly) one of the points made in Peter Pottinger's biography of Bill Evans -- that the very sensitive Evans' solution to the "racial teasing" or worse that he received from other members of the Miles Davis Sextet, including Miles himself, and from audiences in predominantly black clubs like the Spotlite Lounge in Washington, D.C., was to become that much more of a junkie ("he was determined to be the worst junkie in the band," writes Pottinger) in the hope that the fellowship of junkiedom would lessen or overcome the Crow-Jim draft he was feeling. If so, it certainly seemed to have worked that way with him and Philly Joe. I'd bet that the bonds of Evans' friendship with Sonny Clark to some extent lay elsewhere, but it seems likely that Hampton Hawes' wisecrack is based on the perception by guys who were in the know that Evans was doing what Pottinger says he was.

"True Blue" was the only album Brooks made as a leader that was released in his lifetime.

"Block chords, Red!"

Currently retired journalist, unretired (at this point) author.

Sorry for the repeated passage. Should be easy to sort out, though.

"I always thought that 'could' belonged to the realm of possibilities, as do guesses. I guess I could be wrong, though... "I would admit that guesses do not exactly belong with "the hell don't understand," but they do belong to 'could as well,' IMHO." Couw -- "Could" and "could as well" don't mean the same thing. I'm looking at The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. It gives three meanings for the phrase "as well": (a) in addition, also (b) to the same extent © with equal reason or result." "Could," then, would cover guesses or unsupported and/or off-the-wall suppositions; "could as well" would not. "The hooey part is your words and my mouth. I never said you wrote hooey, did I?" No, but you quoted Dan Gould to that effect, and then tip-toed behind a smiley face. "I always thought that 'could' belonged to the realm of possibilities, as do guesses. I guess I could be wrong, though... "I would admit that guesses do not exactly belong with "the hell don't understand," but they do belong to 'could as well,' IMHO." Couw -- "Could" and "could as well" don't mean the same thing. I'm looking at The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. It gives three meanings for the phrase "as well": (a) in addition, also (b) to the same extent © with equal reason or result. "Could," then, would cover guesses or unsupported and/or off-the-wall suppositions; "could as well" would not. "The hooey part is your words and my mouth. I never said you wrote hooey, did I?" No, but you quoted Dan Gould to that effect and then tip-toed behind a smiley face. Have you said anything on this thread or elsewhere that suggests you disagree with that estimate of what I wrote about Mobley? Like what I wrote or not, I don't care -- but own up to what you think.

Couw -- I'm afraid you're leading me down the rabbit hole here, but how can you say " I am not saying that I understand what the hell Ratliff is saying here" in the same post in which you say "the passage could as well translate to something more like that the 'best' in jazz combines all sorts of influences to a coherent whole"? If you don't "understand what the hell Ratliff is saying here," then any guess on your part as to what he meant is admittedly just that -- a guess. And guesses don't belong with phrases like "could as well," no? Or could I "as well" be Alice in Wonderland and you the Cheshire Cat or the Mad Hatter? Also, while you're welcome to your impression that what I wrote about Mobley is a bunch of hooey, fact is that others here have felt otherwise and said so. Don't think that anyone here has claimed to find Ratliff's account of Moran enlightening. That doesn't prove that what I wrote isn't hooey; it does suggest that there is a limit to mere logic chopping.

Couw -- What it would really mean is that the "best jazz groups render" (as in "translate" or "modify") the "material" they're playing until it is more or less "neutral" ("having [in itself] no strongly marked characteristics" is the only definition of "neutral" that seems to fit). Don't think I need to add what "if not irrelevant" would really mean here. What Ratliff probably had in mind is the way -- in jazz, in a "blowing" context -- blues changes or "Rhythm" changes or the like can be the ground base for just about anything a talented improviser wishes to play. But to say flatly that the "best jazz groups" do this, as though this is what distinguishes those groups from others that are less than good, is absurd. Also, many of us have written lots of reviews for daily newspapers on tight deadlines -- "the thing you get when you smear around combining various sentences into one in your word-processor" is no excuse.

I don't look at Ratliff that much but enough to know that something's very wrong there. But a sentence in his review of Jason Moran in today's NY Times stopped me in my tracks. After describing this as Moran's blues band, because it makes ample use of slide-guitar lines, blues scales, etc. and plays an actual piece by Albert King, Ratliff writes: "Yet at the same time the quartet did what the best jazz groups do: render material neutral, if not irrelevant." Again, I'm not a Ratliff scholar (alarming concept), but it seems to me that whatever voodoo is going on in that IMO insane little sentence may be the essence of his method -- it creates the illusion of thought and movement without saying anything that pertains to the subject at all; and thus it remains safely inoffensive, which I think is the goal. Or, to put it another way (which may be why that phrase leapt out at me), rendering himself neutral, if not irrelevant, is what Ratliff himself is trying to do.

Coltrane (and to a lesser extent Ayler) are the models for Jackson Payne because one of the major premises of the book is that Payne is the engine of a vast stylistic upheaval in jazz and one that in his case has would-be profound spiritual implications to boot. Lots of jazz musicians aren't great parents and have drug problems; to my knowledge, only Coltrane fits this pattern (though the book is a work of fiction, and Fuller certainly alters the Coltrane pattern when he wants and needs to).

The Herman version has a superb Ralph Burns arrangment, a highlight of that excellent Mosaic set. Have fond memories of the Pettiford band version too.

Garth -- I recall mentioning the Levitt RCA's to Michael Cuscuna several years back as a possible Mosaic set, but Cuscuna felt that there might be too few potential buyers. So far there are least two of us, because all I have are the Riverside and "Insight." BTW, when the whole Wyntonian era began to manifest itself, particularly Wynton's lame compositional salutes to THE TRADITION, I often though of Levitt, who could quite naturally work deep and subtle homages to the jazz past into music that also was undeniably his own and was damn good music too.

Tatro's "Jazz for Moderns" precedes the Mulligan CJB by several years; even then, Tatro's work is much headier and more "out." The only obvious model for Tatro is some of the writing for Davis "Birth of the Cool" band, but Tatro is his own man. He spent much of his late career scoring TV shows but continued to compose his own stuff in his own style on the side, so to speak. When we spoke in the mid-1980s, he mentioned a twelve-tone guitar concerto he wrote for Howard Roberts and said he'd send me a tape of the premiere performance, but it never arrived. The little boy in the car on the cover of "Jazz for Moderns" is Lester Koening's son John Koening, who went on to become a jazz record producer himself.

"After the fact, no less!" He works fore AND aft.

There were at least two Rugolo LPs on Columbia in 1954-5. Must have heard them some a year or two later on but have no memories.