Larry Kart

Lazaro -- What I meant at the time (not sure that I still believe it 100 percent) is that when Trane's music sounded excited, ecstatic, transcendent or would-be transcendent, that pretty much meant that the state/attitude/whatever of Trane himself could be pretty much identified with the excited, ecstatic, transcendent or would-be transcendent nature of the music (i.e. his relationship to his material was one to one). This had at least two possible effects: It seems to have drained/ate up Trane as a human being, and its implicit placement of him right inside the music's fiery furnace at all times didn't give him much room to step back and ponder whether somewhat different means (e.g. more rhythmic variety) might have given him more musical room to manuever. Guess I was thinking of the then (and still) vivid example of Roscoe Mitchell, who always gives me the feeling, even at his most explosive, that he's looking down or at himself exploding. Different strokes, I'd prefer to think of at as nowadays. Here's a passage that may apply from my "The Avant-Garde 1959-1967" chapter in "The Oxford Companion To Jazz": A father figure to much of the avant-garde, John Coltrane, like Moses, was not destined to enter the promised land. There were, in the latter portion of Coltrane’s career, at least two dramatic turning points: first, his shift from the dense "sheets of sound" harmonic patterning of "Giant Steps" (Atlantic, 1959) to the agonized, harmonically stripped down expressionism that would be exemplified by "Chasin’ the Trane" (Impulse, 1961); and second, his abandonment of meter, which began in 1965 and continued to his death in 1967. Both of those developments were startling, and both arose because the relationship between foreground and background in Coltrane’s music was an uncommonly uneasy one -- so much so that it seemed at times as though he wished to erase the line between foreground and background and fuse all elements into one. That’s certainly what happens on "Giant Steps": To negotiate at speed the harmonic obstacle course that Coltrane devised for himself is to find that many melodic and rhythmic choices have almost been predetermined -- which may be why, as Ekkehard Jost has pointed out, "some melodic patterns in the first chorus [of Coltrane’s "Giant Steps" solo] appear note for note later on." On "Chasin’ the Trane," the uneasy background/foreground turbulence yields a very different sounding yet finally similar result. On"Blue Train" (Blue Note, 1957), Coltrane had invented a corruscatingly brilliant, "foreground" solo against a spare blues backdrop; on "Chasin’ the Trane," against an even more stripped-down blues framework, he plays a long expressionistic solo of such narrow melodic scope that pitches seem to have become almost irrelevant -- the goal, in the face of Elvin Jones’ galvanic drums , again being to virtually merge with an extravagant background rather than to differentiate oneself from it. In 1961, Coltrane said, "I admit I don’t love the beat in the strict sense, but at this phase I feel I need the beat somewhere." By 1965, it had become clear, in the words of his biographer Lewis Porter, that Coltrane "no longer wanted to swing" but rather to play over "a general churning pulse of fast or slow." Here, too, the example of Charlie Parker may have been crucial. While Coltrane was regarded by his peers as perhaps the most forcefully swinging soloist of his time, he could not, within a metrical framework, approach Parker’s dauntingly transcendent rhythmic acuity.

Marshall really shines on Eddie Costa's "Guys and Dolls Like Vibes," with Bill Evans (at his early best), and Paul Motion.

Marty -- I don't have the set but I have the booklet; my friend Bill Kirchner, whocompiled the set and wrote the booklet sent me a copy a few years ago. Because it's 88-pages worth -- with complete personnel, discographical info, etc., plus valuable critical commentary on every track -- I think the best plan would be for me to mail the booklet to you, and then you could copy as many pages as you wish. Send me your address, and I'll send it along.

Jim -- Maybe "shift" isn't the right word, but what I meant is everything that follows that sentence in the notes about the way Rollins developed what might be called "a set of orchestral selves" or "an orchestral set of selves" (hey, why didn't I think of putting it that way?) -- and developed this both in the sense that people like you and me could take what he was doing that way but also in the sense that was really what he was up to: toying with a near-incredible humane gusto with ways of being "here," "there" and "elsewhere" at one and the same time, something that was open to an orchestral dramatist like Ellington, who had an orchestra of personalities/colors at his command, but not to many (if any) horn soloists before Rollins, with of course the pioneering exception of Hawkins. And then would come Wayne to do something similar yet different with the old soloistic "self."

Sal -- I agree that Rollins became Rollins with "Worktime" -- or that was the first recorded evidence of what he had become during his year of woodshedding in Chicago. On the other hand, pre-"Worktime" Rollins still sounds like Rollins to me, just not with the same gargantuan comand of every musical and emotional resource. FWIW, here are the notes I wrote for a 1972 reissue of "Worktime" (with a slightly different ending than the original): Most jazz fans, myself included, tend to view the process of jazz creation in a dramatic, even romantic light. If the artistic product is turbulent, passionate, noble, etc., we feel that the circumstances surrounding its creation must have been similar in tone. As one has more contact with musicians, though, one discovers that it is rarely that simple--musical events that to the listener seem immensely dramatic may have been created in a casual, "let’s get the job done" manner. I mention this as a mild corrective, for if ever there was a recording that deserved the term "dramatic," Worktime is it. The situation was this: Sonny Rollins, who by 1954 had established himself as the best young tenorman in jazz, moved to Chicago for most of 1955 and "woodshedded" (that apt jazz term for artistic self-examination). He emerged to join the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet, and when he recorded Worktime on December 2, 1955, it was his first appearance on record since October 1954, when recorded as a sideman with Thelonious Monk. "Worktime" was a dramatic and startling event, then and now, because it revealed that during his sabbatical Rollins had made a quantum jump in every area of musical procedure. He was no longer "the best young tenorman" but a major innovator whose achievements would have implications for the future course of jazz that have not yet been exhausted, either by himself or by all those he has influ-enced. Most obviously, there was an increase in rhythmic assurance and sonoric variety on Rollins’s part. But these and other seemingly technical gains were all in the service of a shift in sensibility, a unique attitude toward his material that had only been hinted at in his previous work. I imagine that everyone who admires Rollins’s music has commented on its humorous quality, though there seems to be agreement that "humorous," by itself, is not an adequate description. David Himmelstein has added the information that it is "the humor of inwit, of self-consciousness or, as Sonny once aptly put it, the consciousness of a generation nourished on ‘Lux--you know, the Radio Theatre,’ " and Max Harrison has given us the terms "sardonic" and "civilized irony." But the best guide I have found to the sensibility that emerges on Worktime is a remarkable article by Terry Martin titled "Coleman Hawkins and Jazz Romanticism" that appeared in he October 1963 issue of Jazz Monthly. In commenting on Hawkins’s version of "Until the Real Thing Comes Along" (which can be heard on the album Soul ) Martin says that "the whole is a finely shaped drama. Dramatic structure may in fact point to the core of Hawkins’s art. He handles his materials with the ease and cunning of a great drama-tist, and as with great drama the meaning may not correspond exactly with what the characters are made to say. It is the personae and the relations generated be-tween them that contain the essence of the achievement." Much of this also applies to Rollins, though his kind of drama differs in form and content from Hawkins’s. A comparison between "Until the Real Thing Comes Along" and "There Are Such Things" from Worktime may show what the differences are. As Martin points out, one of Hawkins’s methods is to make an initial statement that is romantic in character and then juxtapose it with "highly emotive rhythmic figures" that eventually lead back to the original mood. It is as though he were saying, "Yes, romance does exist, but I want to show you the tough reality that lies underneath." Structurally, Hawkins’s drama is double in effect but single in method--i.e., allowing for foreshadowing devices, he presents one personae at a time--while with Rollins the method as well as the final effect is double ( at the least). No statement is allowed to rest unqualified by him for more than a few measures, and often the very tone quality and accentuation with which a phrase is pre-sented is felt as an ironic commentary upon it. The implications of such an approach are numerous. For one, even though Rollins can retain and heighten the pattern of linear motivic evolution that was hailed en-thusiastically by Gunther Schuller as "thematic improvising," the effect of constant renewal produced by his simultaneous or near-simultaneous expression of multiple points of view is, I believe, the more radical and lasting de-velopment, for it enables the soloist to achieve an emotional complexity that before was largely the province of such orchestral masters as Duke Ellington, whose every band member is potentially a musical/dramatic character. Also, it opens the door to a new view of the jazz past, for the improviser can now range beyond the apparent boundaries of style and make use of any musical ma-terial that his taste for drama can assimilate. Rol-lins’s frequent use of such unlikely vehicles as "There’s No Business Like Show Business," "Sonny Boy," "In a Chapel in the Moonlight," "Wagon Wheels," and "If You Were the Only Girl in the World" can be seen in this light--for while one wouldn’t swear that none of these pieces (and there are many more like them) appeals to Rollins on essentially musical grounds, it’s a safe bet that he is drawn to them because he likes to evoke, toy with, and comment upon their inherent strains of corniness, prettiness, and sentimentality . And by bringing orchestral/dramatic resources into the range of the individual soloist, Rollins may have given to jazz just the tool it needs to survive the apparent exhaustion of the emotional resources open to the improviser whose relationship to his material is one to one, which is what I think can be heard in the later work of John Coltrane. The finest tracks on Worktime, for me, are "There’s No Business Like Show Business," "Raincheck," and "There Are Such Things." Notice, in particular, the utterly unexpected insertion of the verse of "Show Busi-ness" (where Rollins is accompanied only by Morrow’s strong bass line) right after the theme statement. What results is quintessentially Rollins-esque, a compulsively swinging, serio-comic tour de force that at once embraces and bemusedly holds at arms’ length the flag-waving fact of Ethel Merman’s existence.

Eric -- If, as you say, "Peck's schtick gets tiresome," why should it "inspire an interesting defense" of late Joyce or of any DeLillo (the former IMO defensible but not my idea of a good time, the latter just claptrap) or anything else? One would be engaging -- implicitly or explictly -- in a dialogue in which the other party (Peck) already had demonstrated his bad faith by being (again IMO) more interested in engaging in power-games schtick than in anything else. It would, to close the circle perhaps, be like arguing with Stanley Crouch.

I meant "nudging my hand," not "nuding" it -- although "nuding my hand" does bring a strange image to mind.

The problem (if that's the way to put it) about stopping with "Keeper of the Flame," though that's more or less what I've done myself, is that "Keeper" covers the latter days of the Second Herd, and the Third Herd (which is what's on most of the Mosaic set) was a band with a different flavor. I prefer the Second Herd, if I had to choose, but the Third Herd had definite attractions, with its well-matched Pres-drenched tenorman, Bill Perkins and Richie Kamuca, bass trumpeter Cy Touff, a cooking rhythm section sparked by drummer Chuck Flores, and lots of esprit de corps (though it stopped well-short of the IMO rather artifical flash and peppiness of the Bill Chase/Phil Wilson Phillips era). I'd probably have sprung for the Mosaic Capitol, except that a year or so back I found a playable copy of "Jackpot," the Capitol set by the octet with Kamuca and Touff that Woody played Vegas with in '55. Recorded within days of the celebrated Touff-Kamuca Pacific Jazz date, it has much the same relaxed/urgent feel -- at its best it may be even groovier. One of the first records I ever bought (back when it came out), and lack of it might have have been enough to push me into getting the Capitol Mosiac. On the other hand, vague but fond memories of the Third Herd's version of Horace's "Opus de Funk" (from the "Road Band" album) are still nuding my hand toward the "order" button.

I've got the Accord CD. Haven't listened to it in a while but remember it fondly. The Hyperion CD of his songs is at Berkshire for $6.99: http://www.berkshirerecordoutlet.com/cgi-b...ndOr=AND&RPP=25

Basically, what's happened here is that a thug (Crouch) wrote a terrible book and then got mugged in print by a mugger (Peck); then the thug acted according to type when he got a chance. Moral distinctions are hard to come by in this, I think; thug and mugger deserve each other. In fact, it would be lovely if Crouch and Peck were now linked through all eternity.

Chris -- As it happens, the timing is good: See John Leonard's review of Peck's collected book reviews, "Hatchet Jobs," in todays' NY Times Book Review. Peck's review of Stanley's novel actually was one of his (i.e. Peck's) better pieces of work -- a man with a need to proclaim that we're being fed nothing but dung finds himself feasting on a veritable mountain of it. Peck's problem is that his protests IMO are not genuine (however much one might be tickled by a particular Peck assault) but part of a self-serving stance, as in "I'm the best and/or only brave stable cleaner the Republic has to offer." I think we agree on what Stanley's problems are.

Crouch versus Peck, genuine cockroach versus wannabe scorpion. On the other hand, aside from that rough "Which circle of Hell are you in, mister?" equivalence, it probably says something about Stanley's egomania that a good many years after Peck's smack at "Don't Look the Moon Look Lonesome" appeared, Stanley should feel the need not only to physically confront its author but also to issue that weird Wild West threat. Again, Peck isn't even a real scorpion, but if we had a world in which the ultimate response to criticism (even of Peck's sort) were violence, I'm hoping that Chuck Norris doesn't write a book.

Don't forget Chicago's own Birfhouse and the various incarnations of Joe Segal's Jiz Showcase.

Speaking of blind spots, I remember Ira Gitler telling me that he didn't care for Von because he though Von played out of tune. I know what he was referring to, but come on! Unless you grant Von his almost always precisely controlled/shaded intonational universe, which fits into/feeds into everything else he does, you've got no Von Freeman. And this from a man (i.e. Ira) with a deep love for Jackie McLean's music.

I agree with Pete C about that Collectables disc. Don't miss its subtle version of "'Round Midnight," which quite naturally moves Monk closer to Wilson's world than you'd think possible, and the majestic version of "Artistry in Rhythm." The Gershwin stuff is great too.

Brownie -- Thanks for the order, but it looks like you'll have to wait a while. On the other hand, my experience so far has been that in anything that has to do with a book, the author is the last one to know -- it may arrive in August or September. BTW, while I'm getting a bit tired of the contents (having read the stuff over so many times for production/editing reasons), I'm really stoked about the cover. It's based on a grainy, black-and-white flash photo (a bit like a Weegee Graflex image) of bassist Nevin Wilson, Ira Sullivan (on trumpet and soloing, in shades and wearing a narrow-lapel pinstripe suit), and Johnny Griffin (he's listening very intently, horn cradled, also in shades and wearing a loose-weave "Who shot the couch?" sportscoat) in a Chicago club circa 1957 (maybe at a Monday offnight session at the Gate of Horn, maybe at the Pink Poodle). The vantage point is angled sharply upwards and it's taken from very close up, as though the photographer were sitting at a front table, about a foot or two from the edge of the raised bandstand and/or as though the musicians were right in your lap. The shot has a tremendous immediacy, I think, and powerfully conveys the aura of the times -- the sense that you and the players were to some degree swept up in a common enterprise. Besides, I could have been in that seat myself at just that time, listening to Sullivan and Griffin (most typically with a rhythm section of Jodie Christian, Victor Sproles, and Wilbur Campbell). A copy of the photo was passed on to me in 1977 by Joe Segal to illustrate an interview I'd done on Ira, who was coming back to town for the first time in maybe 15 years. Joe no longer has the original and doesn't know who took it (could have been just a snapshot, most probably not the work of a pro). Based on what I recall of Ira and Griffin's comings and goings at that time, 1957 would have been the latest possible time for it to be taken. I'll dare to launch a thread on the book when I'm sure that everything is nailed down.

Of course, "funny." I interviewed Zappa for Down Beat, circa 1968, by the side of a motel swimming pool with some of his band present, notably Don Preston, who seemed like a very nice guy. Lots of ominous/sometimes amusing tension between Zappa and his minions. Piece is in Ye Olde Forthcoming Book, which I'm now told is scheduled for November.

I thought that was Frank Zappa, and the line was "Jazz isn't dead, it just smells bad."

It's that Jaspar Jazz Hot article, or excerpts from it, that's included in the J.J. Mosaic booklet.

I think I know (and agree with) what Chuck means -- though I do like both sides of Rodney's "Red Arrow." Elvin was very one-way rhythmically -- elliptical and/or rotational -- and while that way could be as vast as all outdoors, it certainly didn't fit everyone. To those Chuck mentioned, I'd add Earl Hines and Cecil Taylor.

Stanley I first heard on that excellent Tommy Turrentine Time LP. I thought he was very nice but perhaps a little crude in that context, like he'd rather be playing another kind of music. I think I was right. The next time I heard him I think was on that Blue Note album with Les McCann and Candy Finch, which was just a riot, I thought -- a nutty delight. I like the BN Stanley best but also enjoyed that CTI big jukebox hit of his whose name I can't recall right now. After that, things got a bit mechanical maybe, but every time I heard him live in later years in a blowing context, he was a gas. Elvin I first heard pretty early -- either on the "Tommy Flanagan Overseas" (New Jazz) album (all on brushes and amazingly unlike any brush work prior to that) or on one side of Red Rodney's "Red Arrow" (Signal), both 1957, then on the Donald Byrd-Pepper Adams "10 to 4 at the Five Spot" (Riverside). It seemed fairly clear that there was something new going on here time-wise, something elliptical for want of a better term (in the liner notes to the J.J. Johnson Mosaic set, there's a fine discusssion of this by Bobby Jaspar). Also, I had a friend who was a very good drummer, and he may have made me that much more alert to what was happening. On the whole, though, the really big Elvin thing hit me when it hit everybody else -- when he joined Coltrane. I remember two moments from that band's second engagement in Chicago, at the Sutherland Lounge in the spring of 1961. First, my drummer-friend's girlfriend (a rather fey type) gave Elvin a box of chocolate chip cookies she'd baked for him; he was delighted. Second, on another night Elvin was late for the second set, then came downstairs from his room (the Sutherland was a hotel) and strolled into the lounge completely unclothed (and no doubt a bit wasted). How, and how quickly, this situation was resolved I don't know; I wasn't a witness but know and trust the people who were.

As a devout Mobley-ite, I wouldn't kick the Blackhawk Mobley out of bed, but just compare his work with that band to his contemporary work for Blue Note, which arguably is his greatest -- Soul Station, Roll Call, Workout, Another Workout. No comparison IMO. Aside from the possible/likely draft directed his way by Miles (and no one could chill you like that MF could), I'd guess that the key differences are the presences on Blue Note of Alfred Lion, Blakey, and Philly Joe, and the presence with Miles of Jimmy Cobb -- certainly a tasty drummer but not one who could give Mobley the kind of empathetic, interactive support he needed.

Don't know whether these qualify as underrated or virtually unknown, but how about composer John Benson Brooks' "Folk Jazz U.S.A." (VIK) and "Alabama Concerto"? The former with Nick Travis, Zoot Sims on alto and Al Cohn on baritone, Barry Galbraith, Milt Hinton, and Osie Johnson, the latter with Art Farmer, Cannonball, Galbraith and Milt Hinton. "Alabama" is the more ambitious effort, a unique and major effort of long-form jazz composition that also includes lots of strong improvisation; "Folk" is based on more folksy material than "Alabama" (which draws on Harold Courlander's field recordings, but "Folk" has some soulful, very into-the-mood solo work, especially from Cohn (on "Lord Randall, My Son") and Sims (who's lyricism on, I think, "Turtledove," is ungodly). Brooks, while his own man, was a George Russell associate, and it shows.

I caught Bruce once at Mr. Kelly's in Chicago, in 1959 or '60. Got in with a friend -- we were were both way underage (a senior [me] and a junior in high school), but my friend was well over six feet tall and looked pretty grown up. Unless my memory is playing tricks, this was a night when Lenny made up or debuted a routine -- the "Jean Laffite is bombarding the Capitol!" one about Gov. Earl Long of Louisiana going batty -- because the events that gave it point had happened that day. Not the greatest thing Lenny ever did by any means, but the "nowness" of it was exciting. In fact -- and I'm someone who went on to write a shitload of reviews and think pieces about comedians over the years and interview lots of comics (from Sahl to Andy Kaufmann) -- the "nowness" that Lenny could create was without parallel in my experience. I remember in particular some interplay he launched with one of the club's Latino busboys. The sense that a norm was being at once casually and threateningly violated was overwhelming -- if only because we knew that Lenny was stepping over a line, and that neither we nor he know how far he was going to go. The phrase that I came up with at the time or soon after, and that's stuck in my head is: "Being with Lenny is like being in the same room with a ticking time bomb." BTW, the idea of Lenny as some kind of crusading civil libertarian strikes me as nonsense. Not that his work didn't bring up such issues -- and to the degree that his work became preoccupied with his legal problems, more's the pity for the most part, in terms of the quality of his work. Pauline Kael, of all people (I'm not normally a fan), wrote by far the best piece about Lenny I know, her essay-review of Bob Fosse's sanctimonious biopic "Lenny" (it's in her collecting "Reeling"). A sample: "Lenny Bruce was on nobody's side. The farthest-out hipster, like the farthest-out revolutionary, has an enormous aesthetic advantage over everybody else: he knows how to play his hand to make us all feel chicken. Bruce's hostility and obscenity were shortcuts to audience response; he could get and hold audiences' attention because they didn't know what or whom he was going to attack or degrade next; and they could sense that he wasn't sure himself.... The scriptwriter of 'Lenny' must have thought that Bruce's material was so good that an actor can say it and this will be enough. But those routines don't work without Bruce's teasing, seductive aggression and his delirious amorality. If they are presented as the social criticism of a man who's out to cleanse society of hypocrisy, the material falls flat.... [bruce] went to the farthest lengths he could dream up not out of missionary motives but out of a performer's zeal."

Andy Fitz probably is Andy Fitzgerald, onetime member of the Joe Mooney Quartet. Didn't we have a thread on vocalist/accordian player/organist Mooney a while back?