Larry Kart

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.

Stanley Crouch, of course. His writings have altered the course of jazz history.

Chuck, I think I know what you mean about "the willies." While I enjoy him in certain overtly melodic, relatively stripped down (esp. harmonically) settings (e.g. "Autumn Leaves" on "Somethin' Else," just about all of "Cannonball Takes Charge"), when the background is fairly dense/busy and Cannonball is reacting to it in a "sophisticated" manner, I feel like I'm on a rollercoaster or watching someone's reflection in a funhouse mirror.

One of things that tickles me about "New Bottles" (when I was junior in high school I listened to that album just about every night for at least a month) is the way, on the portion of the title track where Evans writes out a solo-like passage for the entire ensemble, he returns to same rhythmic obsession (don't think that's too strong a word) that marked the theme statement of "Boplicity" -- playing with strong beat/weak beat and long/short expectations to the point where the time (or time) seems about to turn back on itself.

P.S. Jack (so it has been reported) is being paid a bit more than $51,000 a month, though "only" for the first year of his retirement, to serve as a consultant to Tribune Co. I think he should take care of the tip jar.

Lazaro, the guy who caught the show was Jack Fuller, former editor (then publisher) of the Chicago Tribune and, until he recently retired, chief of publications for Tribune Co. He's also the author of several novels, including one about a Coltrane-like jazz musician, "The Best of Jackson Payne."

Oops -- I meant "behind the soloists," not "being the soloists."

Talk about winding -- in downtown Chicago today I ran into a guy who said he was up in Interlachen, Mich., over the weekend, listening a jazz show on the radio when the host played the title track from Sonny Clark's "Cool Struttin'" and either before or afterwards read the account I posted here a few days back of how the rhythm section works being the soloists on that track. Would that have been you, Lazaro?

When I think of Hardman I think of the title of a piece on the Jazz Messengers' "Hard Bop" album (Columbia) -- "Stanley's Stiff Chickens." There was a wonderful stiff-legged "strut" feel to his playing, when he wanted to go that way.

"I wonder if Ornette soloing over Tatro's work would have (or could have) worked out ..." Never in a million years. Tatro's guides to improvisation are based on HIS understanding of his music's developmental nature to such an extreme degree that it's a wonder than any of the soloists can improvise a solo at all. Only Lennie Niehaus, with his computer-like mind, is really equipped to cope, though Joe Maini does kind of fluently play through the music. (Also, several years later, Art Pepper, on his album "Smack Up," played the shit out of Tatro's "Maybe Next Year," though that's not among Tatro's more forbiddingly complex pieces.) If this makes it sound like this music might be dry and nasty, in fact it's marvelous because Tatro's own ideas are really good and unique.

Two somewhat different but related things -- block chords and locked hands. I believe that Milt Buckner is commonly regarded as the inventor of the locked hands approach, which Shearing further popularized -- Red Garland's block chords thing is different enough to be a significant personal variation, I think.

Tatro's "Jazz for Moderns" is IMO among the most (maybe THE most) successful "progressive" stuff from that era, with the possible exception of George Russell and Gil Melle (three very different cats, though). Every time I listen to Tatro's album, it gets me. While his music doesn't sound anything like Monk's, it shares some vital principles with it -- in particular, an almost incredible and magical economy of means and a corresponding refusal to present arguably off-the-wall material as thought it were odd or as though one should get credit for it being that way. Maini does play well, but it's Lennie Niehaus who really gets inside the music, I think. Also, I believe that Tatro wrote out Bob Enevoldsen's and Bill Holman's solos on some tracks. This works out very well in Enevoldsen's case. I tracked down Tatro at some point in the mid-'80s and talked to him on the phone. He said he'd send me a tape of a serial Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra that he wrote for Howard Roberts, but it never arrived. He did send me a tape of some electronic stuff, but I couldn't make much of it -- seemed more like etudes for a rather primitive, cheesy-sounding computer than music, but if they were more or less etudes, that's what you might expect.

Wow -- You leave the house for half a day and all hell break loose! About what hard bop is, this may not be the be-all, end-all of the matter, but this passage from English critic Jack Cooke's piece about Blakey's "A Night At Birdland Vol. 1" (from "Modern Jazz The Essential Records, 1944-70," ed. Max Harrison) seems to home in on a number of essentials: "In the light of later jazz developments, these tracks now have an almost 'mainstream' air, and what was so fresh at the time of their release -- the spirited 4-bar exchanges, the angular, aggresive melodies, the astonishing violence of the rhythm section, and the hectic solos -- quickly became accepted practice. And as it lost its power to surprise, the music more lasting values became apparent. "These were the first recordings by what was then the newly formed Blakey Quintet, later to become the Jazz Messengers, and this was where the drummer fully realized his style. This is a method based closely on classic bop drumming, which relied on a steady cymbal beat decorated by accents and patterns on snare and bass drums, the whole providing a continuous yet varied flow from drummer to soloist. With Blakey, however, the high-hat is introduced on the second and forth beats, breaking up the flow into a more insistently syncopated pattern; the cymbal beat is emboldened to match, and the various accents raised to a degree of becoming often strong, lengthy rhythmic designs in their own right, setting up in polyrhythmic opposition to the basic beat. Inevitably, this is a style in which the drummer no longer functions as accompanist pure and simple, but often, and for long periods, becomes a contributor on the same level as the soloist, playing parallel with him, sometimes competing with him, occasionally even dominating him. It is a style well suited to a leader, and it seems no accident that it flowered at the point when Blakey became just that. "Such a method demanded a similar response from others, and usually gets it here; Silver was building the same kind of attacking method for the piano in the rhythm section, and here he and Blakey become a rare combination of wit and ferocity, a team without equal.... "t ought to be said how important Silver's writing was to this date, for the willing old bop warhorses could only carry this music part of the way. 'Night in Tunisia,' which became almost Blakey's personal anthem was something of an exception, and Vol. 2 of this set demonstrates the proposition more clearly [that] there there was real need for the fresh jolting angularities of Silver's compositions." To amplify, or to just point again to what Cooke already has said, one hallmark of hard bop is that the rhythm section assumes a virtually choral (and often fairly worked out) role in relation to the soloists. Another way to look at this, a la what Martin Williams wrote about Horace Silver in "The Jazz Tradition," is that the relationship between horn sections and soloists that prevailed in Swing Era big bands was now being imported into small groups, with the rhythm section playing as much of an orchestral-section role as a horn section did in, say, the Lunceford Band (certainly a notable model in Silver's case) or, of course, the way Basie, Green, Page and Jones fucntioned in Basie's band. Cooke doesn't quite say this, but the choral, orchestral role of the rhythm section in hard bop not only called for more co-ordination between its members, a la Blakey and Silver, but also for some simplification, vis-a-vis bop, in the name of unified effects, particularly on the part of the drummer -- with a somewhat stylized "astonishing violence" (to use Cooke's apt phrase) taking the place of the dizzying and more spontaneous complexity of Roach or Haynes in full flight behind Parker. As Cornelius said, hard bop didn't always need to be "hard," but the orchestral-choral role of the rhythm section in relation to the soloists was close to a constant, I think. An example of this at one of its ripest moments is the way, on the title track of "Cool Struttin,'" Sonny Clark, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe work as Clark leads off as soloist, and then behind Art Farmer and Jackie McLean. It's fairly low-key compared to Blakey and Silver, but the rhythm section -- working chorally/orchestrally and virtually as one -- comes up a subtly different time feel and set of accents for each chorus, to the point where the whole damn piece feels as though it were governed by a single evolving compositional impulse, though without much if any sense that things have been worked out other than in the moment. Particularly striking is what happens during Farmer's choruses; he's so alert to what's going on behind him, and what's going on there is so cleverly engineered to stiffen his musical spine, that it would be hard to say how much of what Farmer plays here (and it's great stuff) amounts to the rhythm section playing through him.

Chuck may the only person on the planet who agrees with me here (if he does), but I love Jacha Horenstein's mid-1950s Brandenburgs on Vox. At some point in the tranisition from "old" ways of playing Bach to "new" ways (and we've now had more than a few of those), the idea that Bach's music had a vital vertical, sounding-together component as well as a horizontal, contrapuntal lines in motion one, seemed to get lost. Or rather the vertical component, in the HIP era, came to be focused primarily on the timbre of the "right" instruments sounding together rather than on those vertical harmonic components that Bach 's music shares with, say, the music of Brahms. Without being at all heavy, Horsenstein gets the vertical and the horizontal aspects going in what seems to me to be just the right way. I wouldn't mind hearing this done in more modern sound and with HIP trimmings, but I've never this in any of the HIP recordings I've run across.

"'In a typical Mobley solo there is no drama external to the developing line...' "If you mean drama in the structure of the solo, then I don't agree." I mean "drama" in this sense: A lot of great players (and tenor players in particular e.g. Ben Webster, Ike Quebec, Dexter Gordon, Gene Ammons, Sonny Rollins) use means other than, or in addition to, the developing line (emphatic shifts in timbre, volume, semi-isolation and/or heightening of certain phrases by the use of pauses/rests, etc.) to in effect present us with a solo that might be compared to an act of effective public speaking or a speech by a character in a self-created stage play. One feels more or less that the soloist's goal is to establish and explore a certain mood and convince of its strength (and of his conviction) in dramatic terms. We are being addressed or are witnessing someone address another or others -- we're like Lincoln's audience at Gettysburg, like somone watching Romeo speak to Juliet or Brando telling Rod Steiger in "On the Waterfront" that "he coulda been a contender"). (A choice, if perhaps extreme, example is Quebec's virtually programmatic "Easy, Don't Hurt," but I hope the principle is clear.) Mobley, by contrast, does not seem to me to address us in this manner -- "In a typical Mobley solo there is no drama external to the developing line." While he is of course playing in public, his musical "speech" is not shaped like a public, dramatic discourse; it lack those foreshadowing, "this is going to about..." cues that mark the music of the mentioned above; one could even say that Mobley's primary audience is himself, plus the musicians with whom he's playing at the moment. (In this, he's akin to Lee Konitz.) Thus, again, the need to listen to every note with Mobley versus what I think is the case with the players mentioned above. While people like the people on this list usually listen as closely as we can because that's where the fun is, the external drama of an Gordon or Ammons solo -- the way it's filled with cues as to where it's going and when and how it's going to get there -- allows us to follow its general progress rather well without paying attention to every note. (I'm sure that many people do listen to Ammons, Gordon that way -- I've done so myself when there was other stuff going on around me that called for some attention and could follow what was going on in the music quite well.) But with Mobley at his best, my belief is that if you don't follow him note by note, you're not likely to get what he up very well -- because his solos (for good reasons) lack external drama and because (here it comes again), because many of his choices are ambiguous or equivocal, and because this meaningful (and I think quite deliberate on Mobley's part) ambiguity or equivocalness is most evident (at times maybe only evident) on the note-to-note level. Is this not one of the reasons why a lot of people who like the gneral style of music within which Mobley worked did not rank him as highly as many of us did and do, or even dismissed him outright? To put it another way, I think you've got to really work with, think along with, Hank to get him; a Rollins, an Ammons, a Gordon, does a lot of that work for you. Not that makes Hank a better player than they are, just a somewhat different one in that respect.

In the next to last paragraph, that should be "thus Mobley builds" instead of "this Mobley builds." Also, sorry if I got a little snarky there. I hadn't read Cornelius's response when I posted the one I sent after I'd inadvertently sent another while in mid-sentence and was under the impression that he had been getting a little snarky with me. But that's how it goes with us "open-ended, free-associative" types.

SORRY, HIT THE WRONG KEY. TO REPEAT AND CONTINUE: Chuck -- you're right about the date of "Spirits." A senior moment. Cornelius -- You're right about "Soul Station" being recorded (2/7/60) before Mobley joined Miles (early 1961). About the "stylistic upheavals" thing, I didn't mean that Mobley didn't pay attention to Trane (or Rollins) but that their "upheaval"-like ways of development and (at times) of music-making weren't his. Surely, for example, when one places "Giant Steps" alongside, say, "Chasin' the Trane," "Ascension," and Intersteller Space," a path of stylistic upheavals is what we hear in any number of areas, while we don't hear anything like that, either in Mobley's own playing or in the contexts he chose to work during that span of time. Likewise, I think that's the case (though to a lesser extent than with Trane) when the point of comparison is the Rollins of 1959, the Rollins of "The Bridge," and the Rollins of the Cherry-Grimes-Higgins band. About Duke Jordan and Sonny Clark -- while Jordan certainly was active in the hardbop era and beyond, he was a fully formed musician by 1947, when he recorded with Charlie Parker, and remained more less that marvelous player, in stylistic terms, from then until now. Also, in 1947, hard bop (if that term means anything, and I gather we both think it does) was nowhere to be found. Sonny Clark, to quote from the liner notes to "Sonny's Crib," was "almost an unknown when, as a member of the Buddy DeFranco Quartet, he came East in Janurary 1954..." Note the year, seven years on from 1947 and well into the so-called hardbop era. Also, Clark becomes a shaper of that era's music stylistically -- hear the way the rhythm section works on the title track of "Cool Struttin'" in particular -- and Jordan (again, marvelous as he was and is) does not play that role in that era. About Mobley's periods -- you got yours, I got mine. About your "say what?" paragraph and the one that preceeds it,, while I suspect by now that you may just be dicking around with me here, I'll try to respond to a few of your points and questions as though you were not. 1) "Why must one experience every one of Mobley's notes to understand his music any more than you'd expect to have to listen to every note of any jazz musician?" See the passage on p. 120 that begins "In a typical Mobley solo there is no drama external to the developing line..." as swell as the answer to your next question below. 2) "Do you mean that the music is so adventurous that there's doubt whether the musician's choices of notes will turn out to be good ones or what adventurous gambit they'll embody? But what is meant by 'ambiguities of choice'"? I think the answer to this question, as well as the one you ask above, is right there, in the words "there are many points of development, each of which can inspire in Mobley an immediate response..." Of course, Mobley choses the path he does in each case, but I think we often hear how easily he might have chosen a tempting to him and close to hand alternative; his music seems to mull over multiple possibilities in the moment far more than, say, Rollins or Dexter Gordon do; this Mobley builds into his lines a sense of how open, or ambiguous, an act it might be to choose one possible path over another. Don't you hear something similar in middle- to late-Lester Young? OK -- so my writing leaves you cold; so be it. And you don't think that the Donald Byrd of, say, "Off To the Races" was brassier than the Byrd of "Senor Blues" or "Nica's Dream"? OK, again.

Chuck -- you're right about the date of "Spirits." A senior moment. Cornelius -- You're right about "Soul Station" being recorded (2/7/60) before Mobley joined Miles (early 1961). About the "stylistic upheavals" thing, I didn't mean that Mobley didn't pay attention to Trane (or Rollins) but that their "upheaval"-like ways weren't his. Surely, for example, when one places "Giant Steps" alongside, say, "Chasin' the Trane," "Ascension," and Intersteller Space," a path of stylistic upheavals is what we hear in any number of areas, while we don't hear anything like that, either in Mobley's own playing or in the contexts he chose to work during that span of time. Likewise, I think (though to a lesser extent than with Trane) when the point of comparison is the Rollins of 1959, the Rollins of "The Bridge," and the Rollins of the Cherry-Grimes-Higgins band. About Duke Jordan and Sonny Clark -- while Jordan certainly was active in the hardbop era and beyond, he was a fully formed musician by 1947, when he recorded with Charlie Parker, and remained more less that marvelous player, in stylistic terms, from then until now. Also, in 1947, hard bop (if that term means anything, and I gather we both think it does) was nowhere to be found. Sonny clark, to quote from the liner notes to "Soony's Crib," was "

Jim -- I think you're right; that review must have run in 1970 because I don't see it in bound copy of DB 1969. Couldn't have been any later than that, though, because I was gone from there in '70 at some point. So glad I got you in trouble in high school -- wait a minute, that doesn't read right! Martin wanted "earthy" plus "heady" plus "new," and he defintely didn't want "showy" or "prepackaged." Jug, if Martin had even been paying much attention to him, thus would have been pretty much crosswise to what Martin liked or desired, however mistaken he might have been even by his own lights -- Jug pleased the people, but he was damn serious abut his music. I'd say that if Martin, circa 1958, had been asked to pick a young-mature player who exemplied what he dug or was looking for, it might have been Art Farmer.

I think Martin thought of Tristano and Konitz (and Marsh too) as a pack of self-consciously progressive/intellectual/isolated musical "scientists," and of course they were white. In fact, there were, arguably, some guys like that around at that time -- Teddy Charles, Teo Macero, John Laporta, Gil Melle et al. -- but Tristano, Konitz, and Marsh were in a different place. Also, as his writing before and after the advent of Ornette makes clear, Martin felt strongly that the state of jazz in the mid-'50s cried out for something really new to be done, but he was convinced that none of the available "progressive" paths (except for George Russell's and Mingus's) were likely to lead anywhere worth going because they weren't in tune with jazz's earthy (for want of a better term) essence, especially in terms of rhythm. Thus, I imagine, the advent of Ornette was almost literally like a dream come true for Martin. Too bad for him that the mindset that let him hear Ornette so well seems to have prevented him from hearing Lennie, Lee and Warne for what they were. Typically, as I recall, Martin was among those who hailed Lee's Milestones label album where he hooked up with Roy Eldridge, Ray Nance et al. as a big and necessary step forward for Lee. There are some things that work OK there and IMO some things that don't, but it's not like Lee was some damn apostate wandering in the wilderness.

Yes, I know the early Evans recordings (as leader and sideman) pretty well -- bought most of them as they came out in the normal course of things and still like almost all of them. In addition to the first two leader dates, I'm particularly fond of his playing on the George Russell "Jazz Workshop" album, Hal McKusick's "Cross-Section Saxes," and Eddie Costa's "Guys and Dolls Like Vibes" (one of those beautiful days in the studio). He's also in very good form, I think, on Art Farmer's "Modern Art," Mingus' "East Coasting" and the Jimmy Knepper date on Bethlehem, the one with "Idol of the Flies." On the other hand, about the Tristano aspect, I recall Martin Williams praising the Evans of this period for making something of Tristano or bringing Tristano more into jazz or something like that -- as though adaptation, even domestication, were what what Martin thought Tristano's needed and what Evans had accomplished. There's certainly a good bit of Tristano in early Evans, and it's put to interesting use, but I don't think that Tristano's music needed anything to be made of it, and Tristano himself was fine just where he was and as hairy as he was (or might have been) -- a more substantial figure than Evans to my mind, though there's certainly room for both of them.

"Dude, why can't you learn to love Bill Evans?" It's funny, Jim, but there are some players I like a lot (Bill Carrothers, Don Friedman) or find myself becoming interested in these days (Dave Kikoski) who clearly are related to Evans in terms of being influenced by him (or just running along similar lines in the case of Friedman) -- also Carrothers and Kikoski probably stem just as much from Hancock and Jarrett, two other players who don't do a lot for me. That makes me think that what bothers me is mostly what I hear as Evans' frequent over-reliance on formulas after the death of LaFaro, plus the way his genuine fondness for the moods and habits of the American popular song tradition began to mutate, in the face of what he seemed to take as the "threat" of the avant-garde, into something defensive (and/or pastoral-protective) -- and defensive-pastoral-protective in ways that began to affect how he actually made his own music in the moment. So even though Carrothers, Kikoski, and Friedman make music that's similar in mood to latter-day Evans a fair amount of time, they seem much livelier and more interesting to me. On the other hand, I don't get at all for why there's a fuss in some quarters over Brad Mehldau. To me he's Sominex with a side order of navel-gazing.

A nice (and long, more than 2,000 words!) review that was posted yesterday at All About Jazz: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=16236

For a thorough calendar of Chicago's currently very yeasty avant-garde scene, go here: http://www.savagesound.com/ If you want an annotated guide for the week you'll be here, remind me when we get close to it, and I'll tell you what I can. If you'll be staying in Hyde Park, there's a nice session on Sunday nights at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap at the corner of 55th St. and Woodlawn, with an old friend of mine, Doug Mitchell, on drums. Doug's alarmingly good; in our informal high school jazz band back in the late '50s he took the place of Steve Bagby (later with Red Rodney and Ira Sullivan) and was felt by most to be at least as talented as Bagby, if not more so. Doug's been an editor at the U. of Chicago Press for many years, but his chops and imagination are in great shape. To place him stylistically, his idol is Roy Haynes.

Believe me, Lazaro, I didn't set out to have the band members disagree with Zappa. On that day at least it seemed pretty clear that they were plain sick of him and vice versa; my being there just gave the ongoing conflict a chance to take a brisk walk around the block. On the other hand, I'm sure that Zappa's complaints were as familiar to the Mothers' ears, as their rejoinders were to his. In fact, that might have been the gist of the problem.