Larry Kart

Garth -- I agree about what happened to Bill Perkins (though it was often interesting and sometimes kind of moving to hear him struggle around in the hairshirt he'd chosen to don), but I feel he got the old lyrical groove going quite well on the album he did with the Metropole Orchestra. About the "hairshirt" thing BTW, it seemed to me that the problem there was that Perkins kept trying to transform dissonance (and roughed-up timbre) into a rhythmic principle -- this because his time feel essentially remained what it always had been -- but beyond a certain limited point this didn't work; instead you'd hear (or I'd hear) the strenuously worked over layers of dissonance and gnarled timbre separating themselves from the actual note-to-note rhythms of his solos, which just weren't that angular. I do have a weak spot though for his playing on the two latter-day albums he made with Lennie Niehaus --especially the second one, with Jack Nimitz added. Everyone is playing and thinking at a high level of intensity on that one, and Niehaus to me is just so strange -- as though, rhythmically, he was determined to play just about everything oh so smoothly backwards. Sometimes I feel as though Niehaus were channeling Frankie Trumbauer by way of Berg's "Lulu."

Another tough one for me -- and I'm not sure I've turned the corner yet -- is Gerry Mulligan as a soloist.

A tough one for me for a long time was Benny Goodman -- as a clarinetist, not a bandleader. I think now that it was because I'd heard so many neo-Goodman guys playing that repertoire, particularly in person, that I couldn't hear what those licks sounded like when they were fresh, real, and fully inhabited. Also, I probably was handicapped some because, of "star" clarinetists of that era, I preferred Artie Shaw if I had to choose. The RCA Goodman small groups box from a few years ago turned the light on.

I'm not anti-cabaret pure and simple but find both Short and Mabel Mercer pretty hard to take. It's not just that neither of them has much voice (neither does Blossom Dearie or lots of others who are more or less in that bag) but also, at least for me, that the voices they do have are so obtrusively hoarse and grating. It's like there's almost nothing musical going on, or that can go on, when they open their mouths -- most of the time I'm thinking that they should just talk and forget about hitting or sustaining any notes. Also, while I can see that part of Short is coming out of a mostly forgotten vaudeville/early Broadway bag, I can't believe that at any time in his adult life he was among the better representatives of that tradition. For instance, if you can, check out the way Jack Gilford sings the part of Alexander Throttlebottom on the mid-1980s CBS recording of the Gershwins "Of Thee I Sing." It's not quite the same thing as Short's world but close, and Gilford puts over that material with a zest that lets you know that he knows what it means to win over a real audience -- not the pre-sold crowd that Short typically faces.

Richie Kamuca's tribute to Charlie Parker album, "Charlie," reveals him (i.e. Kamuca) to be one fine alto player, very close to Bird in spirit but his own man too. Latter-day Kamuca (on either horn) is a joy -- not that I don't like early Kamuca, but a case can be made that he came fully into his own in about '60 or '61. There's an album of session material I think, from '58 or so (with Scott LaFaro? have heard it but don't own it) that finds Kamuca halfway between his early Pres manner and contemporary Rollins (with maybe a pinch of Trane), and boy does he sound hung up, as well he might have. Interesting that his running buddy Bill Perkins went though some of the same changes.

Maybe I don't get the joke, but neither is Frank Strozier. Bernie McGann of Australia is one hell of a player. An altoist for sure, he's so much his own man that it's hard to compare him with other players of the instrument -- a la Steve Lacy and other soprano saxophonists. If McGann comes from anyone, it might be Sonny Rollins. Ira Sullivan played some alto back when but not a whole lot as I recall. He was, as you might expect, damn good. I think Ira would have sounded damn good playing a Hoover vacuum cleaner. I think he's on alto on several tracks of the ABC-Paramount album he made with the Billy Taylor Trio -- a disc that sadly I haven't seen or listened to for at least 40 years.

That Martin Williams four-part series on the "state of affairs in jazz" I mentioned a while back -- the one that ends with a hymn of praise to the World Saxophone Quartet -- appeared under the title "How Long Has This Been Going On?" in Jazz Times (Feb.-March-April-May 1987). I'll try to scan it in some time, but I have doubts whether that will work -- I don't have the original magazines but a dark, dim, and blotchy Xerox -- and it would be a bear to type it in (maybe 6,000-8,000 words in all), My guess is, as I think I said before, that Martin was not in good health at the time (he died in 1992) -- he sounds tired and distracted, and some of what he says ignores or contradicts things that I know he knew to be the case, if only because he'd said that they were the case in pieces he'd written before.

I worked with/under Dan at Down Beat in 1968-9, and I don't recall any orchestrated campaign against the avant-garde. Ira Gitler sure didn't like that music, and he and Dan were and still are friends (I'd like to think I was a friend of Ira's too -- he's a terrific guy, great sense of humor -- but our paths haven't crossed that often), but no one who wrote for Down Beat when Dan was there was being operated by remote control. Who had time for that, anyway? The days of Coltrane's music being referred to as "anti-jazz" (by John Tynan, I recall) were under a previous editorial regime (maybe Gene Lees or Don DeMichael), but again I think that was a reflection of the views of the writer or writers involved rather than an orchestrated editorial campaign. There were several instances (under DeMichael, I think) of two reviews being run side by side of albums that were thought to be controversial, but on the whole, nothing like the bop versus moldy-fig wars of the forties. Certainly no one told me that I couldn't write enthusiastically about, say, Roscoe Mitchell. The only time when I was there that I recall Dan being tempted to intervene in what a writer had to say was when someone, in a jazz festival review, wrote that a Tal Farlow set was bad because Farlow's music was "out of date" (or words to that effect). I'm pretty sure we let it stand though, because I vaguely recall wincing all over again when I saw the phrase in print.

If my memory is working, that quote about Brooks was from a phone conversation I had with Oliver Beener. I think Cuscuna put me in touch with him. All I know (or remember) was in the liner notes. I did see some of that Charles footage when it was playing in the Jazz Record Mart one day, but I was in a hurry and couldn't linger.

Mmm-hmm -- what a linear singer. There is, or should be (if they used the ones I wrote for the Japanese LP issue in the mid-1980s), a fond Red Garland encomium to Watkins in the "Minor Move" liner notes.

Clem -- I'm pretty sure it was the same Israel Young, the guy who was connected to Sing Out!, right? Don't know who did what at The Jazz Review, but I've always felt that Hentoff, for all his usefulness early on (at least to guys like me, reading Down Beat in the 1950s and looking for guidance and enlightenment) was kind of square in that his relationship to the musicians seemed a bit puppy dog-ish. (Martin, by contrast, I think maintained his distance and his dignity -- even if he arguably was over-invested in the dignity thing. I was the one who said you might not want to read Martin on Ammons or Arnett Cobb.) Back to Nat -- as time has passed, it seems to me like jazz has more or less become one of his many free-lancer meal tickets, to be punched when necessary. Likewise, after a certain point his liner notes became on-the-nod strings of quotes, from himself and other sources. I had an interesting encounter with Mr. Zappa, or so it seemed to me. It's in the book. Don't recall what blues Martin liked, but I do recall him pointing out in print on several occasions that the once fairly common belief that the blues was a folk music pure and simple doesn't hold up to examination -- rather, what we have is a fairly constant recycling and reshaping of popular music of many kinds and vintages and that, for example, what one might prize as deeply authentic and personal in a Blind Lemon Jefferson or a Leadbelly or a Fred McDowell or a Snooks Eaglin (different as they each may be) often turns out to have been a song that they first heard on the radio or on a record and then wrought into a shape they found pleasing. Allen Lowe is THE expert on this whole multi-faceted process. Martin, I believe, found the whole idea of "folk music" (or rather the ideology of it) wrong-headed, even pernicious. No, he didn't like Johnny Griffin (but then you knew that -- right?).

Ah, but does a baseball really curve? There were scientists who said for years that it didn't/couldn't and that anyone who thought it did was the victim of an optical illusion. About Martin and the jazz avant-garde, somewhere I have a late-ish (mid-'80s?) three-part piece he wrote that expressed what turned out to be (I think) his final printed thoughts on the subject. He made some shrewd, some disgruntled points and held up as his main sign of hope the World Saxophone Quartet, which seemed to me to not be a good sign. That is, I thought that the WSQ was kind of beside the point --especially in light of Roscoe Mitchell's incredible sax quartet version of "Nonaah," which came first by several years and was miles ahead of anything the WSQ ever did IMO -- and that Martin's singling out of the WSQ was a sign that he hadn't been paying enough attention lately, but then I think he was in declining health. I'll look for that piece later on and try to report in more detail on what it says.

Also, to quote the best sentence/thought I think I ever came up with -- History is always happening, and it's happening to US. It was the experience of listening to/running alongside jazz, more than anything else, that taught me that, and they can't take that away from me.

Please, though I guess it's hopeless -- don't forget THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE. It's simply (though what's simple these days?) so much more fun when you run into, say, Monk's "Little Rootie Tootie," to then make the acquaintance of Ellington's "Daybreak Express" and "Happy Go-Lucky Local," Luckey Roberts' "Railroad Blues," and so forth. (And it can go vice versa or sideways.) We should deny ourselves such natural horizon-expanding pleasures because Marsalis, Crouch et. al are using The Past as a club to beat their idea of the culture over its head? To let malevolent minds edge you off the ground you've been standing on since before they were born? Also and again, it can be really PLEASUREABLE to think about jazz as hard as it's in you to do so. It's never felt to me, and to most everyone else I know, like anyone was MAKING us do that. Geez, isn't it all one big steaming pot? Some of us, to use Jim's ball game analogy, are made to be more like Johnny Damon and some of us to be more like Bill James, but our paths and thoughts do cross, and we probably care about many of the same things.

Sorry, ZTraug -- I didn't mean at all that your sentence was ill-put or awkward. I meant that I could imagine many sentences that say ugly things and that literally began "You have to know Miles to understand..." -- for example, "You have to know Miles to understand" why he hit this woman or did any number of the other cruel or irresponsible things he did. Why should he get a pass when he behaved like an S.O.B. or a jerk? I think his remark that all you need to do was listen to Ornette to know he was all f****** up inside was either stupid or a fearful piece of politicing on his part. Any number of Ornette's recorded solos ("Peace," for one) spoke of and from an emotional wholeness that was rare in modern jazz. As for Miles' autobiography, it's generally acknowledged to be a highly unreliable document, littered with inaccuracies and fabrications -- both courtesy of Miles' collaborator on the book, Quincy Troupe.

"[Miles] also told that 'white critics' were praising the new thing on purpose so that white artists could be popular and jazz will be pushed aside." Well, that certainly worked out just as "we" planned it. Nany ugly sentences could begin with "You have to know Miles to understand"...? How do you put down somebody and respect what he's doing? Clem -- Those invisible signals are easy to miss. And I'm not so smart; it's these pills I take, plus the occasional use of a cloaking device.

No added tracks on "Very Saxy."

Clem -- It was Miles who said that Ornette was all f***** up inside. I know for a fact that this remark really bothered Ornette, long after the the fact. No doubt in my mind that Martin really dug Ornette; there are some latter-day reviews (e.g. of the concert that is on the album "Crisis") whose passion couldn't be faked IMO, and even if it could be, there would have been little or no political reason then for Martin to do so. As for Ornette and Trane, there are arguable reasons (can't say for sure they were Martin's) for thinking that the former had really "broken free" in some rich, fruitful sense, while the latter was climbing up and sliding down a steep glass mountain. My attempt to puzzle through that is in the chapter on the avant garde 1944-1967 I wrote for "The Oxford Companion To Jazz."

About Mike Charry's point -- maybe so in the long run, but I think that right at that time Ornette was a bigger stretch than Cecil, for several reasons. First, Cecil back then (i.e. at the advent of Ornette) was nowhere near as hairy as Cecil would become; and he still could be regarded as fitting into (albeit in a quirky way) some pre-existing "progressive" contexts. Likewise, to use a phrase I think I coined (do I really use "just thrilling" a lot?), except for 4/4 swing, Ornette's music violated virtually all of jazz's then prevailing "norms of craft professionalism," not that Ornette was necessarily interested in violating anything. In any case, a common response to Ornette from the pros was "He can't really play -- he doesn't know what he's doing -- he's all f****** up inside," etc. while with Cecil I think it was more "He's an over-intellectualized, would-be iconoclast" on the one hand, or, a la Gunther Schuller's approving response, "His main concern is to extend, bend, or even break the bounds of tonality" (again, a long-familiar "progressive" penchant, though not IMO the way to look at Cecil's music that makes the most sense). Finally, my memory is that even though Cecil was known of in the wider world before Ornette was, the relative size of the response to their music at the time was heavily weighted in Ornette's favor.

Hey Jim, I think you (and maybe I too) are making this all way more complicated than it needs to be. "Obviously, the deeper one digs, the deeper one digs, dig?" I agree. So why then, if you have the time and the inclination, would you ever stop digging? Only if you broke your tools or there was nothing left to dig, I guess. BTW, I don't think I said anything about finding out about the past BEFORE plunging into the now -- just that curiosity, some sense of obligation (if only to yourself), and above all the good old pleasure principle made engagement with as much of the music's past as you could your hands on a really useful idea. Two other things about jazz's now and then, from personal practical experience. For people of my age, the biggest "challenge" (if that's the way to put it) we've faced so far probably was the advent of Ornette. I mean, if you were in your late teens when he hit, the first question was, "What IS this shit? and the second is "Is it any good?" or alternatively "What is it good for?" (i.e. if it is good, why is it here and what role is likely to play). Certainly, with the exception of Martin Williams, none of us was getting much help from written sources at first, while the verbal reactions of much of the musical community tended to be hostile, and the musical reactions hadn't yet occurred. Well, I'll tell you for true, if you already knew and loved, say, Johnny Dodds (other names could be placed here, but Dodds made it click for me), then some of what Ornette was doing made sense right off the bat; you were over the hump. And of course, Ornette being Ornette, his now happened to be brimful of the personally modified past -- pieces of which "just happened" to be lying around on the ground for him. Scroll back to 1955, when I was just getting started. I liked blarey, athletic big band things a lot -- all those albums, like Manny Albam's "Drum Suite," that were being produced by the NY studio guys of the time. The more pounding, the more brass, the more punchy neo-Basie/Herman riffs the better. Then I ran across the first RCA reissue of the '40-'42 Ellington Band, with Ko Ko, Jack the Bear, Concerto for Cootie, Harlem Airshaft etc. Music that was made just before I was born, but it was an immediately obvious fact that it was (a) much better than anything I'd been listening to (b) of permanent value and © just thrilling. Aren't those two examples normal, natural things to happen? Haven't things like that happened to you? So what's the problem? Clem -- You say Jelly Roll's music is irrelevent. What the heck do you mean? If you mean that it's unlikely that any significant musician today is going to find that Jelly Roll's music is going to speak directly to him, all I can say is that if Morton spoke that way to Henry Threadgill and the rest of Air back in the late 1970s (and it did), then (a) it's almost certainly still speaking to him and (b) it's probably been (or will be) speaking to others of his stature. If you mean that Morton's music is irrelevant to you the listener, that's your call but only your call. And you don't need Tatum either? Again, in both cases, I'm not interested in setting up as a school marm and saying this stuff is good for you -- I'm simply invoking what seems to me to be the pleasure principle.

I think that the details were very important to Martin. He certainly dealt with them more than many jazz critics did or do, though saxophonist-composer Bill Kirchner, who knew him well, has told me that Martin's reach could exceed his grasp when it came to technically accurate musical description, though he was almost always grasping in the right direction.

Jim: Sonny doesn't have to get Jelly Roll (though he might well have). I believe that by and large jazz musicians (like all artists) pay careful attention to what they think they can use, and for them the rest is gravy or even sometimes a distraction. For instance, Willem de Kooning, speaking of the connection between his painting and the 'vulgarity and fleshy part" of the Renaissance, added that he had use only for Western art: "I admit I know little of Oriental art. But that is because I cannot find in it what I am talking about. To me the Oriental idea of beauty is that it 'isn't there.' It is in a state of not being here. It is absent, that is why it is good. It is the same thing I don't like in Suprematism, Purism, and non-objectivity. "And although I, myself, don't care for all the pots and pans in the painting of the burghers--the genre scenes of goodly things which developed into the kind sun of Impressionism later on--I so like the idea that they--the pots and pans, I mean--are always in relation to man. The have no soul of their own, like they seem to have in the Orient." So it's OK for De Kooning to ignore the Orient and for Sonny to not get Jelly Roll (if in fact he didn't), because it's their business to make certain connections in order to make certain things. Is De Kooning's account of the Oriental idea of beauty accurate? I don't know. But for his purposes it doesn't matter. To say that and think that played some role in his being able to paint his pictures. But it's another sort of deal for us (and course, you're a musician as well as a loving, aggressive listener) to ignore or not get the total warp and woof of this music, even if we decide that we finally don't like, say, the jazz equivalent of Suprematism or multi-limbed statues of Shiva. To put it another way, if Wynton Marsalis means nothing to me, I feel like I need to know why he doesn't. And not just to protect myself in the marketplace of talk; the total warp and woof (or as much of it as I can see) is something that to me is very interesting.

Re-read Martin's "TV, The Casual Art" and was reminded of how strong and sure the moral spine of his work was -- strong in ways that it would be hard for any of us of later generations to emulate. Not that we'd necessarily be less alert or level-headed at the crossroads where art and morality meet, but the flavor of our engagement would be/is a bit (sometimes more than a bit) different than Martin's was. Can't put further words to that difference right now, but it's one of things that came through very strongly as I read this book for the first time in a long while. Perhaps part of that feeling has to do with Martin's cut-off point for commentary (in a 1982 book) being the '70s era of the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "The Rockford Files," about both of which he has shrewd things to say. Makes you really want to know what he would have said about both the Newhart sitcoms and a host of other later things, including "Seinfeld" of course -- which I can imagine he might have admired or might have hated. Along those lines, and perhaps to touch upon that elusive difference thing, I remember Martin's intense dislike of Albert Brooks' movie "Modern Romance." As I recall, he thought the grotesquely self-involved, narcissistic character that Brooks played in "Modern Romance" more or less was Albert Brooks, and that the movie was an attempt on Brooks' part to justify the behavior it depicted. I could hardly believe that Martin, as smart as he was, could think that, even if this was the first piece of Brooks' stuff he'd seen (I think it might have been). But even if Martin was in one sense factually mistaken about what Brooks was up to in that movie, in another sense -- one that stems from the nature and age of Martin's moral vigor (i.e. "age" as in the era in which it was shaped) -- he may well have been right, because there's a strain in Brooks' slippery, one millimeter removed from actual whining, actual self-indulgence, etc. humor that is potentially so evasive that our trust (make that my trust) in what I think Brooks' dramatic strategies are may be close to an illusion. Again, it would be good to talk to/argue with Martin about this -- and many other things -- again.

Williams on TV, correction. Some of those pieces may be in "Hidden in Plain Sight" (Martin recycled a lot), but the core collection is his "TV, The Casual Art," which is available used. Need to read it again (I have a copy), but just opening it up I noticed that he has some shrewd positive things to say about "Green Acres," differentiating it clearly from "the simple rusticity of 'The Beverly Hillbillies' or the sticky, self-satisfied cuteness of 'Petticoat Junction.'" ["Green Acres"] "joins farce and whimsy, a difficult task.... Eddie Albert is superb. If he showed one more degree of exasperation and anger at his bungling but triumphant bumpkin antagonists, he would become a bully or a bore. But he never does." Also, a lot of these pieces were written for the Village Voice.

Clem -- Yes, I read and enjoyed (if that's the right word) "Sheeper" when it came out, still have it on the shelf. Didn't know Rosenthal though -- think he was a bit ahead of my time, either that or different circles. Another thing about Martin -- he really tried to ride the surf board of jazz's living history as far as it was in him to go, rarely if ever overrating anything merely because it was new (or claimed to be new) or disparaging anything because it was old and unfashionable. It's a simple principle, but for me if you don't get, say, Jelly Roll Morton, then I have big doubts about your ability to really get Monk, or Bird, or Ornette or whomever. Not that it's impossible to get the latter without getting the former, but the music is more or less of one piece, and I think that Martin felt that in his bones in a way that a lot of other good writers about jazz don't (or haven't), even if they pay lip service to the idea.