Larry Kart

Talking to Brooks' friend and musical associate trumpeter Oliver Beener while working on the notes for "Minor Move," I was told by Beener that the cause of Brooks' death was "general dissipation." That doesn't explicitly say drug use, but it seems likely that drug use was part of the picture.

We were in London in about '88, at the Forbidden Planet bookstore on our last afternoon in town while our son (about 12) spent at least an hour culling out from the stock every precious Judge Dredd comic book he could find. Just as we got to the counter, the whole block was evacuated because of a bomb scare (IRA I believe), and we were told that the store would not reopen that day. Only now am I beginning to be forgiven for this.

I know that Lazaro Vega = Blue Lake, just dunced out on your given name while typing that reply and didn't feel like hunting for it. Would love to hear what Kalaparusha had to say. Don't know that Louis Smith/Christian duo album, will look for it. Another Chicago guy (at one time) who had/has that open, perhaps even vulnerable, non-ironclad "pro" feeling was Chris Anderson. I have cassette I made of Frank Chace rehearsing with pianist Bob Wright (a sadly little-known player who had one foot in ragtime and Harlem stride, one foot in Tristano but really sounded like no one but himself and who no longer is able to play because of arthritis or some similar muscle-joint condition). Among the pieces they play are "Warm Valley," "If You Could See Now" and "Ladybird." Commercially available at one time from ragtime pianist-writer Terry Waldo was a cassette Waldo had made of Wright playing rags and stride pieces. It's something else.

Blue Lake, sorry for mixing up what horn Armacost plays on what track. It's been a while since I listened to the album. In my recent experience -- a couple of live performances last Sept., several recent albums -- Kalaparush has been pretty variable, but at his best he can stop your heart. At the Chicago Jazz Fest he played a ballad (said later that he'd essentially improvised it on the spot; it sounded like that was the case) that was one of the most beautful songs I've ever heard -- as though Coleman Hawkins had improvised "Body and Soul" as well as played his solo on it. That night at a club, or maybe it was the next night, it seemed like he and the trio never got into gear. Could be that the variability (if I'm right about that) and Kalaparusha's ability to go to deep primal places are aspects of the same thing. He's got little or no "professional" armor, but when his (honest, vulnerable, open?) human presence aligns with the musical setup of the moment, it's something else. I've gotten some of the same feeling from other Chicago musicians in other styles over the years -- in particular, Wilber Campbell and Nicky Hill, maybe Jodie Christian and clarinetist Frank Chace too -- an exceptional sensitivity to the immediate musical environment (sometimes to the point of vulnerability if things weren't going just right around them) that allowed them to go to places that more iron-clad "pros" would never dream of. Kalaparush's background and era are different, though, and all this may be just my imagination working overtime.

FWIW, I wasn't knocked out. Here's an email I sent today to someone I'd urged to go but who couldn't make it: "Actually, you were in luck. The brief opening set (with Jeb Bishop, Thomas Maier [contrabass sax), Peter Schmid [bass clarinet and e flat clarinet), Fred Lomborg-Holm, Kent Kessler, and Tim Mulveena) was quite good, with Bishop in a very relaxed and creative frame of mind, but the featured group -- led by Jorrit Djikstra and with most of the same players (James Falzone in, Maier and Schmid out) -- was not very successful I thought. I like Djikstra's playing on alto all right, but he used a lyricon (yuck!) on two pieces out of four before I left (would have stayed till the end, but I had to get up at 6:30 a.m.), and his writing was full of what someone once called "twiddly bits" -- the kind of thing Miles Davis probably was referring to when he said of an Andre Hodier piece that it was 'like a bad modern painting.'" Schmid and Maier (sp?) are Swiss. The opening set BTW was "free," in the good sense.

Paul -- What I understood MW to mean by "Jimmy Raney was bebopper!"was that beboppers by and large (in his opinion) were prone to build solos by stringing together a lot of licks, not by thinking melodically. I recall that he said something like that in a DB Bystander column about Serge Chaloff. So for me to cite Raney as a great jazz lyricist was in Martin's view absurd. I still say he was dead wrong on this one, but then by that point he was pretty angry.

Barring a deluge, I plan to catch the band in Chicago tonight.

Jim -- My feelings about Williams are way on the plus side. Not that many critics in any realm ever do as many things right as he did and do them on the spot too. (His immediate response to/role in making a way for Ornette was a great thing, even if some feel that he stepped over a critical ethical line or two at that time, praising a guy in print while he also was involved in pushing/guiding his career to some extent.) On the other hand, I didn't have to work with/for Martin. The chewing-gum story is for the sequel (or "sequel").

Jim -- Martin Williams blowing his top must have been something to behold. I was never on the receiving end in person but do have several knife-in-the-gut letters and postcards from MW. He was my idol I guess back in the mid- to late-1950s when he was writing for Down Beat, the Saturday Review, Evergreen Review etc. -- he seemed like the only guy around who was dealing with the music seriously (although in Martin's hands, seriously sometimes became "seriously," which to an impressionable teenager of a certain sort must have been part of the charm). When I got to DB in '68, he still had a column there, and we corresponded/talked on the phone a fair bit over the years on a tense/friendly basis -- the master/mentor thing still hanging in the air in both our minds I think. That altered some when he asked me to look at the about-to-be-published revised version of "The Jazz Tradition." (I'd reviewed the first edition of "The JT" for the American Record Guide back in '70 or so and said then that it was as good as it was [and is] but also made it clear that I thought Martin's approach was a bit puritanical in its reluctance to talk about the expressive/emotional side of the music--though I understood that he felt, with good reason, that there'd been too much "impressionistic" blather of that sort in the history of writing about jazz. In effect, his master/mentor was B.H. Haggin.) Anyway, I gave him some I think useful responses to the revised JT, and after that I think we met more as two grown-ups, to the degree that was possible. The thing was, Martin was an inherently testy guy -- not only because he had legitimate oppositional responses to a lot that was going in jazz, the arts in general, and the world in general, but also because he was embattled bureaucratically at the Smithsonian and elsewhere and seemed to find himself in (or seek out) relationships with young disciples whom he would on occasion browbeat unmercifully, perhaps a la "The Great Santini"--Martin was the son of a Navy officer I recall), in one case to the point of a nervous breakdown on the part of the disciple (also the son of a high-ranking military man I believe). BTW, I mean nothing sexual by "relationships with young disciples." I'm pretty sure that neither Martin nor the guy I'm thinking of was wired that way, not that there's anything wrong with that.) My favorite perhaps-revealing personal encounter with Martin took place at a Duke Ellington conference that was being held at the U. of Illinois-Chicago in the early '80s. Martin was there with his current tweedy young disciple, and I sat down next to them at what turned out to be a long Gunther Schuller lecture. Back then I was a smoker, and after 40 minutes or so I began to fidget and brought out a pack of Dentyne. Martin noticed this and said quite sternly: "You chew gum?" I sort of knew what he meant -- that the Virginia patrician side of him regarded gum-chewing as a vile, vulgar habit indulged in only by shop girls in 5 and 10 stores or guys who pumped gas -- but mentally and physically I was caught in mid-motion and said without really thinking: "Sure, you want some?" The one good putdown I've ever delivered in my life, and I didn't even mean to do it. My favorite by-mail dispute with MW was about a long contra-Bill Evans piece I'd written for the Chi. Tribune in '82 or '83. MW said in a letter that I didn't care for Evans because I was "afraid of lyricism." I replied that it seemed a mistake to equate lyricism with romantic moods, that to me lyricism in music primarily meant a commitment to the life of the evolving line and that to the degree that highly patterned harmonic sequences determined the shape of Evans's lines in much of his later music (IMO), that made his status as the jazz lyricist par excellence rather shaky. And I added that my idea of great jazz lyricist was Jimmy Raney. To which MW replied with a one-sentence postcard: "Jimmy Raney was a bebopper!"

Jim S wrote: "What was Hamilton's "dirty little secret" (or perhaps it was Concord's) was that Scott Hamilton's REAL roots weren't in the Swing Era, but in R&B. This explains a lot of things about a lot of things, especially why Hamilton didn't really dig deep into the vernacular which he was appropriating, as well as why those who WERE conversant with it found him sorely lacking. A real ear-opener for me (and possibly a sigh of relief for Hamilton) was Duke Robillard's SWING album, a collection of music that was "jazz" in surface but R&B in style and intent. Hamilton seems to have felt a LOT more comfortable playing this stuff than he did trying to channel the then still-living Flip Phillips. Ever since then, it seems like a bit more relaxation has crept into his playing, and a bit more stylistic signifying has crept out." OK, that's pretty much what I was picking up on when I heard Hamilton live with Rosemary Clooney way back when but without taking the next logical step and thinking that there was, or would be, a literal R&B connection, probably because, as you say, the ambience that Concord and others wrapped around him was so "Thank God, we've turned back time -- Here's a young guy who plays like the guys we loved when we were young." Anyway, that Street Beat/Jump thing was a proto-R&B sound in the hand of some players (the early Lockjaw, Jack McVea, etc). P.S. Have you heard my new band, the Squirrel Nut Beiderbeckes? Also, I didn't know that Martin Williams wrote about Hamilton along those lines. I do remember Martin, about 20 years before, slamming Jack Sheldon on just that basis -- referring to West Coast trumpeters who copy Miles Davis but "put the climaxes in the wrong places." But, hey, in that case I'd say that Martin was wrong -- Sheldon did do some funny things along those lines, but I think that was because Sheldon had an impish/eccentric/even surrealistic musical sense of humor that was his alone, not because he was a Davis copyist who had only grasped his model's surface gestures.

Red -- If I had to pick one from the list, I 'd try the 5/26 Empty Bottle gig. They're all very good players on a good day, and usually these informal groups (this is a new one to me) are put together with a fair amount of preparation. Adasiewicz is an interesting composer-vibes player in a kind of Al Francis vein, Josh Berman is a cornetist who might be described as having one foot in Don Cherry's camp and another in Ruby Braff's and/or Tony Fruscella's (if you can imagine that combo), Keefe Jackson plays mostly tenor and can be very good (I said something about him in the Eric Alexander thread in "Recommendations"), Jason Roebke is a good bass player, and Frank Rosaly is an excellent drummer. How spacey or straightahead the music will be on this night, I don't know; I've heard each of these guys do both in various groups. My second choice would be the Hungry Brain gig, with some of the same players. Abrams is a good bass player, Rempis is an excellent alto/tenor saxophonist; don't know who Eisenstadt is. A factor might be locations/ambience. The Brain is further out from the downtown area but a comfortable neighborhood bar (about a third of a block east of the corner of Belmont and Western), a relaxed friendly place with good acoustics. The Empty Bottle, closer in, is an armpit-like rock joint/bar in not the greatest neighborhood -- parking nearby on Western Ave. (not sidestreets) is advised; spots on Western usually are easy to find. Neither place, as far as I know, is that accessible by public transportation; taxi cabs certainly will get you to both. Getting back I'd say that you probably could find a cab cruising by on Western fairly soon; at the Brain you'd probably have to call for one. Can't vouch for Ari Brown at Green Dolphin Street, haven't heard him in some time, but that's a club that would be in the Chicago Reader listings. Wednesday - May 26 ******************************** * Rolldown w/ Jason Adasiewicz, Josh Berman, Keefe Jackson, Jason Roebke, Frank Rosaly 9:30 PM at the Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western - 773-276-3600 ($5) Sunday - May 30 ******************************** * Josh Abrams/Josh Berman/Harris Eisenstadt/Dave Rempis 9:30 PM at the Hungry Brain, 2318 W. Belmont - 773-935-2118 (donation)

Dan -- About Scott Hamilton and syntax, here's one specific thing I had in mind: Hamilton got the Ben Webster-Flip Phillips sound/articulation down pretty well, but it seemed to me that when it came to constructing phrases and whole solos with that sound/articulation combo, he was drawn to that 1943-45 so-called "Street Beat" approach, a kind of "Jump" thing that is certainly nice in itself. But then when it came time to play ballads, it seemed to me that what Hamilton did is take those Jump/Street Beat figures and essentially slow them down, with results that sound kind of "off" in themselves (to me) and that is not the syntax of ballad playing in that Webster-Phillips style; their phrasing on ballads is more or less rhapsodic, not slowed down "Jump." Not that Hamilton doesn't have the right to do things differently than his models, if those different ways work, but it didn't seem to me that they did work very well, and it also seemed pretty likely that his different way was based on a less than good enough understanding of how the style he liked actually worked. If I'm right, that's an example of one of the temptations/dangers of a revivalistic trawl through the past: You fall in love with one of the more immediately attractive manifestations of a prior way of doing things, and you emulate (and are often rewarded for emulating) those traits, but without grasping how the whole thing that gave rise to the traits you dig actually worked and was put together -- its syntax so to speak.

Marty -- Some young to middle-aged tenor players who seem to me to stand out are Walt Weiskopf, Mark Shim, and Tim Armacost. (In fact, if any Eric Alexander fans are willing to trust my recommendation, I think Armacost might knock you out. He's big-toned and muscular, swings like crazy, and has a self-developed harmonic extensions thing going that to my ears really works. I'd recommend "Live at Smalls" (with Tom Harrell) and "The Wishing Well" (with Bruce Barth, Ray Drummond, and Billy Hart), both on DoubleTime. BTW, on "Live at Smalls" Armacost plays Ornette's "Invisible" (on soprano) and really plays on the tune as given throughout, which is a kind of crazy thing to do but really stimulates his inventiveness. Harrell, by contrast, gets pretty hung up on that framework. Another guy I'd urge Alexander fans to check out is Ralph LaLama. Yes, LaLama's from the previous generation, but stylistically they're probably not that far apart, and they've both been on much the same scene for a good while, long enough I think for the differences between them to be not merely a matter of age and experience. You can listen to LaLama note to note and really feel the choices being made; also, within a basically muscular, drenched in the changes style, he's often outrageously melodic, a real song singer. In a more avant-garde vein, there are two young guys around Chicago on what might be called the post-Vandermark scene who show a lot of promise IMO: altoist Aram Shelton, who's put out several self-produced albums ("On Cortez" with his trio Dragons 1976 and "Arrive" by a quartet of that name), and tenorman Keefe Jackson, who has yet to record except as a member of an ensemble where he doesn't get to show what he can do. Jackson, if this be not blasphemy, reminds me a bit of the young Kalaparusha -- he's got that "sculptural" thing, where every gesture implies a larger context; you hear the thing that's stated and the unstated mass it's been carved from. Got my fingers crossed on him. And FWIW, free as they may be, Shelton and Jackson seem to be fully schooled players too. About Jim's "the giants are gone" point, I guess I don't look for/expect giants on the order of Bird, Trane, Tatum, Pres, et al. these days, figuring that if they come they come, we'll all know it, and respond accordingly. What I do look for is genuineness on whatever scale, personal in-the-moment engagement with the material. Was Pete Brown a giant? Was Herman Chittison? Dave Schildkraut? Harold Land? Shafi Hadi? Joe Thomas? Tony Fruscella? Russ Freeman? The list could go on and on, through a lot of different eras. And then that thing came to be hard to come by I think, no matter what the scale of the attempt, and it seemed like we were faced with not asking for/expecting that thing, and/or pretending that we were getting it when a voice inside said that we weren't. Genuineness, as outlined briefly above, I'll hold out for -- while admitting that each of us judges that factor subjectively and admitting too that there are certain (here's that term again) post-modern ways of going about things that put genuineness through the wringer in a perhaps necessary and useful manner.

Jim -- The "Worktime" notes are in the book. Or do you mean that I changed the way they end? If so, I thought that the old concluding sentence or two didn't work anymore because they played sort of lamely off something that Martin Williams once wrote that I'm sure almost no one remembers. Anyway, the new ending seemed decent, and I don't think it's a case of me pretending to say something then that I couldn't have said then.

Dana--The original version of that reply to McDonough's piece did have the "spread your legs" line in it; I took it out for the book version (didn't seem that funny any more). No, I haven't heard any more Alexander since the '94 vintage EA on that Magnerelli album. I'll try more EA (not that anyone necessarily cares) when, as I said up above, someone who digs him now but understands what bothered me about EA's playing back then can tell me what's changed in him and how. If that sounds snotty and unreasonable, so be it -- life is too short to listen to everyone and everything. About Hamilton over the passage of time, I mentioned that his playing on "Soft Lights and Sweet Music" seemed pleasantly lively and real to me, but not so much that I felt the need to seek him out. Life is too short etc. Dan--Either I didn't make myself understood well enough and/or you didn't really read what I wrote. Either way, I'm sorry. Marty--Quinichette is an interesting case. I think about him in couple of ways. One: What happens when I put him alongside guys like Bill Perkins and Richie Kamuca, who also were drenched in Pres and of the second generation? (Though maybe Perkoins and Kamuca were really of the third generation, because they were young enough to have heard and been affected by Getz, Sims, et al.) Whatever -- do I hear genuine, distinctive invention from all three of them, even in their most Pres-drenched modes? (I think so.) Two: Quinichette is an older cat, b. 1916 -- only seven years younger than Pres and almost a decade older than most first-generation Pres disciples (white or black). Obviously Q imbibed his Pres whole, but he was out there playing professionally with name outfits in the late '30s (though his strain of Pres is more the Post-Basie Pres in tone and articulation, no?) Sure, Q sounds a good deal more like Pres than the clearly Pres-affected-to-some-degree Budd Johnson did, but their cases might be somewhat similar (all three with Southwest links), with Q just catching a very intense case of the Pres virus. Three: Somehow the fact that Pres referred to Quinichette as "Lady Q" rings a bell with me. Yes, Pres used the "Lady" tag a lot, and I certainly don't assume that this means anything literal about Q's personality, but I'd bet any amount of money that he was a guy who spoke in Pres' language because Pres spoke to something deep in him. And even then, is it really that hard to tell them apart? If I ever mistook one for the other, it was probably thinking for a moment than Pres of a certain vintage was Q, not the other way around.

To answer that Scott Hamilton question, here's another piece from the forthcoming book. ( I do recall one Hamilton album, "Soft Lights and Sweet Music" with Gerry Mulligan, that didn't have the problem(s) I go on about below. Maybe Gerry's presence helped: In a 1981 review of a performance by Rosemary Clooney, I wrote this about two members of her band, tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton and cornetist Warren Vaché: "Not so gratifying [as Clooney] were Hamilton and Vaché, relatively young players who began by emulating Swing-era stylists and who have yet to find a personal manner. More disturbing than the revivalistic impulses of Hamilton and Vaché, though, are the ways in which they misunderstand and cheapen the style they profess to admire. Each man presents a surface cosmetic warmth, with Hamilton crooning á la Ben Webster, and Vaché putting a burry, Bunny Berigan-like edge on his tone. But the techniques that Hamilton and Vaché apply in such a haphazard fashion were part of a specific musical-emotional language. To hear that language being trifled with is both musically and morally disturbing." That review led to a dialogue in Down Beat magazine with critic John McDonough, who saw the desire of Hamilton and Vaché (and that of other young musicians) to work within the stylistic patterns of the jazz past as a very positive development. This was my response to McDonough’s piece: [1982] If we were building the ideal jazz musician, we would probably want to make him an innovator. But innovation is not the question here. Instead it is the degree of honesty and understanding with which specific players deal with the music’s past. First a distinction should be made between those jazz artists who have been inspired by their predecessors (Louis Armstrong’s Swing-era disciples and the host of Lester Young acolytes of the 1940s would be good examples) and, on the other hand, those players whose approach to the jazz past is essentially revivalistic--as the music of Scott Hamilton, Warren Vaché, and many of their contemporaries seems to be. No matter how humbled he may be by his model, the disciple of the first sort doesn’t wish to recreate the music of Armstrong or Young. Rather he hears something in the inspiring artist that speaks to something in him--a musical/emotional message that the disciple wishes (and needs) to expand upon and, as much as possible, make his own. The revivalist, however, regards the chunk of the jazz past that attracts him as an essentially completed act. And often he is drawn to the past of jazz in part because it belongs to the past--because the music speaks of values that seem to have been needlessly abandoned and that the revivalist wishes to reanimate, preserve, and inhabit. Injecting one’s own personality into the music is at best a side issue, the goal instead being to accurately bring to life what is no longer as alive as it once was. Now jazz revivalism has an intriguing, quirky history; and I would not want to be without the music of Lu Watters, Graeme and Roger Bell, or Dave Dallwitz. But revivalism works best when it deals with styles in which the soloist added color and point while the ensemble remained the dominant force; it runs into special problems when the style being recreated is one that relies on the soloist’s ability to express an individual instrumental personality. Leaving aside the question of whether or not Hamilton and Vaché are self-conscious revivalists, their music certainly is based on late Swing-era styles in which individual instrumental personality was paramount. We love Ben Webster and Don Byas, Buck Clayton and Bobby Hackett not just because their music was beautiful in the abstract sense, but also because it told their stories, revealing something essential about the kind of men they were. And this storytelling aspect of the music was expressed in a very precise musical/emotional language--one in which the individual artist’s tonal and rhythmic inflections (the growls, smears, slides, and so forth) were both his trademark and the means he used to convey his evolving emotional messages. And this storytelling, languagelike aspect of the music has, like all languages, some specific rules of diction, grammar, and syntax. It is there that I part company with most of today’s more-or-less revivalistic players, whether their models come from the thirties and forties (as Hamilton’s and Vaché’s do), from the fifties (as do those of Lew Tabackin and Richie Cole), or from the quite recent past (as is the case with David Murray). To my ears, these musicians often speak the language they profess to love in a haphazard, inaccurate, even vulgar fashion, making grammatical and syntactical errors in the realm where notes are translated into emotion that are as disturbing as if they had flubbed the changes or turned the beat around. Place a typical Hamilton performance alongside a solo from such a master storyteller as Ike Quebec (or compare a Lew Tabackin effort with something by Sonny Rollins, or listen to David Murray next to Albert Ayler), and one hears countless musical/emotional gestures that have been mishandled or misunderstood, as though the perhaps unwitting emulator were wearing a tweed jacket with candy-striped pants. So it’s not just the emulative aspect of these players that is troublesome, because my knowledge (such as it is) of the music that inspired them tells me that they aren’t even good emulators, let alone personal craftsmen. (A question for another day is whether one can be a craftsmanlike disciple of Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, or John Coltrane--in the same way that one could, and perhaps still can, be a craftsmanlike disciple of Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, or Don Byas.) That a number of these young revivalists have been praised, and sometimes hired, by such masters as Buddy Tate, Buck Clayton, Roy Eldridge, Benny Goodman, and Earl Hines, does not automatically settle the aesthetic issues in their favor. It’s understandable that many older players (and those critics who have great affection for their music and may not care that much for later developments) would be cheered to find younger men paying homage to the past, for no one likes to feel lonely and most of us like to be flattered. But even if there were no trace of self-deception in the praise of Hines, Tate, et al., that praise is refuted by their own lastingly vital music, which remains the standard by which their would-be disciples must be judged. While I certainly wish that there were as many personal craftsmen at work in jazz today as there were in 1935, 1945, and 1955, I believe that the craftsman approach to jazz is, for a number of reasons, becoming harder and harder to sustain. In any case, if jazz is about to turn itself into a largely revivalistic, repertory music--a kind of living museum in which everyone from Johnny Dodds to Albert Ayler is fair game--it seems all the more important to protest when one hears jazz’s glorious past being reproduced in ways that are musically and emotionally inaccurate. To do otherwise would be to admit that we no longer hear the difference.

Yes, indeed. Had no idea we were both full of bull (i.e. Taureans).

Based on the only Eric Alexander I've heard -- his work as a sideman with Joe Magnerelli on "Why Not" (Criss Cross, rec. 12/94) -- I'm in Jim S.'s camp. One more-or-less shopworn (albeit "swinging") phrase after another, stapled together like pieces of cardboard, little or no sense of organic language-understanding or personal emotional involvement -- the latter all the more annoying because so many of the Dexter-ish gestures he throws around are brimful of emotion in the hands of their originator and sound rather ghastly (to me) when the sense of personal presence has been sucked out of them and/or been tossed aside. (That's what I mean by lack of "organic language-understanding," which may jibe with what Jim S. was reacting to.) Damn it, jazz is NOT a game and/or an athletic contest -- not in this style and at the level Alexander apparently aspires to. It isn't a game for Magnerelli, for one, whose Dorham roots are readily apparent but who is (or so it seems to me) making a good deal of personal contact with the material in the flowing moment. He's testing/being himself. Alexander, by contrast, is jumping over hurdles while modeling for a poster. Makes me want to scream. I know, you'll tell me he's grown a lot by now, but I'll trust that only if someone can tell me that they hear something of what I hear in late-'94 vintage Alexander and can say where and how all that athletic cheesiness evolved into something else.

Scott Hamilton is at the Jazz Showcase that week, the Denny Zeitlin Trio (with Buster Williams and Matt Wilson) comes in 5/1-6. Otherwise check out the listings in the Chicago Reader, available online, though I recall that they only go out a week from the current date. In an avant-garde vein, you might find these gigs interesting. Wednesday - May 26 ******************************** * Rolldown w/ Jason Adasiewicz, Josh Berman, Keefe Jackson, Jason Roebke, Frank Rosaly 9:30 PM at the Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western - 773-276-3600 ($5) * Greg Ward & friends 9:30 PM at the Velvet Lounge, 21281/2 S. Indiana - 312-791-9050 * Jim Baker/Harris Eisenstadt/Kyle Hernandez 8 PM at the Hot House, 31 E. Balbo, 312-362-9707 Thursday - May 27 ******************************** * Daisy/Hatwich/Rempis/Rosaly Quartet * Harris Eisenstadt Group w/ Tatsu Aoki, Keefe Jackson 9:30 PM at 3030 W. Cortland, 773-862-3616 Friday - May 28 ******************************** * Harris Eisenstadt Quartet w/ Jeb Bishop, Jason Adasiewicz, Jason Roebke 9 PM at Candlestick Maker, Chicago, IL, 9pm * Triage - Dave Rempis, Jason Ajemian, Tim Daisy 11:30 PM at Hotti Biscotti, 3545 W. Fullerton (no cover) Saturday - May 29 ******************************** * Harris Eisenstadt Quartet w/ Jeb Bishop, Jason Adasiewicz, Jason Roebke 10 PM at the Velvet Lounge, 21281/2 S. Indiana - 312-791-9050 Sunday - May 30 ******************************** * Josh Abrams/Josh Berman/Harris Eisenstadt/Dave Rempis 9:30 PM at the Hungry Brain, 2318 W. Belmont - 773-935-2118 (donation)

Hey, Joe -- You should have written the book! You say some really interesting things -- "'The problem of influence,' it seems to me, cannot be isolated within the influenced" is something I would have loved to steal. On the other hand, having a conversation that pushes your (i.e. my) thoughts ahead of where they'd rested is what it's all about. BTW, I wish I hadn't said "post-modernism" or anything like it -- the term gives me the creeps and seems to me to be flung around a lot more than it should -- but it was lying right there on the road to the next several sentences (about Misha Mengelberg and the whole Dutch crowd, trimmed off below), and I couldn't resist.

Joe -- Some more about Shorter and the "soloistic ego" from the introductory chapter to Ye Olde Forthcoming Book: "Is the expression of individual instrumental personality still the norm in jazz ? The facelessness of so many technically adept younger jazz musicians is often remarked upon ("The soloists have become so generic ," in the words of veteran composer-valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer); and this is commonly attributed to the homogeneity of the jazz education system, the long-lasting, pervasive influences of John Coltrane and Bill Evans, the sheer weight of the music’s past, etc. But perhaps it also is a kind of revolt or protest from within, a way of saying that the role openly expressed, on-going individuality has played in jazz no longer matches up well with the habits of the rest of the world or that it now comes at a price that is too high to be paid. "And yet Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter already were stepping back from the direct expression of self some forty years ago--guided, especially in Rollins’s case, by Coleman Hawkins’s example. The rich complexity of Rollins’s musical thought, and his ability to at once dramatize and ironically comment upon virtually any emotional impulse that came to mind, led him to express multiple points of view--one could even say summon up multiple selves or characters--within a single solo. This was, however, not an approach that Rollins could sustain during the 1960s, in the face of rapid stylistic change in the surrounding jazz landscape. Responding to those changes in his own work, as he did quite strikingly up to a point, also meant that the broadly shared musical-emotional language of romantic sign and sentiment that had so deeply stirred Rollins’s own sentiments and wit was now becoming historical. It was a language that could still be referred to and played off of, but for him apparently not with sufficient immediacy. "Shorter’s temperament--also deeply, even subversively ironic--led him at first to toy brilliantly with the idea that any soloistic gesture could or should be taken at face value. In the typical Shorter solo of the early- to mid-1960s, seemingly forthright, "heated" musical-emotional gestures are disrupted, even mocked, by oblique, wide-eyed shifts to other levels of speech (cool, chess-master complexity, blatantly comic tonal and rhythmic distortions, and so forth). Rollins had said, in effect: "There are many selves at work here, and I am present in all of them." Shorter took the next step: "Why assume that any of these selves is a self, that any of them is me?" Significantly, this aspect of Shorter’s music emerged at the same time that Coltrane was plunging headfirst into the expressionistic sublime, although Shorter’s seemingly innate distancing diffidence also seems to have played a role. In any case, after he left the Miles Davis Quintet, Shorter increasingly withdrew from the solo arena (from 1970 to 1985 he was a member of the jazz-rock group Weather Report), and on the rare occasions when he has returned there, it is his diffidence that he essentially expresses. (That Shorter returned to the concert stage and the recording studio beginning in 2002 is a hopeful sign, though the rather studied elegance of the results so far suggests something less than full engagement.) "In the music of Rollins and Shorter, humorous or ironic speech turns into doubt about the act of speaking, about the on-going integrity of the language itself. Here, it would seem, the scrim of post-modernism begins to descend upon jazz, perhaps before the concept was even formulated.... Etc.

Thanks, Chaney. In the photo, which is about three years old and was taken in an Ann Arbor alley, are (left to right): Toby Summerfield, bass; Brian Hacker, guitar and vocals; Jacob Kart, guitar; and Chris Salmon, drums. In real life, Toby is about the size of your typical NFL defensive tackle.

It's a treat (also even a necessity) to be here, talking and listening. I remember how weird (even angry) I felt when the BNBB went under, only to discover (thanks to Chuck, I'm pretty sure) that Organissimo was up and running and that in any number of ways it was/is much better. One of the few times I can think of in recent years when something like that has happened, in any realm of human endeavor.

Don't know about any signings yet; I (and the publisher's publicity department) haven't gotten that far. I'd definitely like to get to the Ann Arbor Borders though; my son worked there after he graduated from the U. of M. (he works at the Jazz Record Mart in Chicago now and plays in a genuinely musical rock band named [somewhat ironically] Crush Kill Destroy that took shape in Ann Arbor--the three other members are all from Michigan). I always liked the town -- good used book stores, good used record store (hope that one still exists), breakfast at Cafe Zola, etc. P.S. I'm pretty sure that Crush Kill Destroy has an active website, with songs and info. They're loud but not THAT loud (the name comes from an episode of "Lost In Space" where a murderous android went around repeating that phrase), and they think highly of bands like Tortoise, Polvo, Don Caballero, and Isotope 217, if that has any meaning.

Thanks for nailing that down, Alankin. Figures that the author wouldn't be the first to know.