Larry Kart

A Strazzeri trio album that really caught my ear is "Kat Dancin'" (Discovery) from 1985, probably only on LP. Also worth tracking down his Cadence interview -- he's a deep, soulful guy; his close-up view of the Frank Rosolino tragedy/disaster is especially moving.

Don't remember whether it was said by Booker Ervin in a DB Blindfold Test or by Dexter Gordon in conversation, but my favorite remark about Lockjaw's playing was: "Damn, that Jaws plays backwards!" Now that I think again, I'm pretty sure that those words were Ervin's (referring, I assume, both to Jaws' methods of note production and the resulting shape of his phrases), while Dexter's bemused remark, which I don't recall exactly but which sounded similar to what Ervin said, referred to Jaws's way of backing himself into harmonic corners and then just battering his way right out.

P.S. An excellent but fairly obscure Al record from 1956 (never on CD AFAIK, unless Fresh Sounds got to it), is the Al Cohn Quintet on Coral, with Brookmeyer, Mose Allison, Teddy Kotick, and Nick Stabulus. Stabulus' neo-Blakey approach, coupled with Kotick's great, Pettiford-like time and notes, really makes this one get up and walk.

The Xanadus are excellent, as are all or most of the Concords I know (including one gem under painist Ross Tompkins' name). I think Al became an even better player around Xanadu time than he had been before, especially rhythmically, perhaps because he cut back a good bit on his arranging work. I heard him a lot live in Chicago from the late '70s till his death, and he was in great form every time. I particularly remember gigs that paired him with Lee Konitz, with Clark Terry, and with Allen Eager, and one with Zoot where he almost pulled his old friend up to his level. (I'm one of those people -- maybe I'm the only one -- who thinks that Zoot was at his peak in 1956 and was often on automatic pilot from then on.)

WNMC writes of "tendentiousness as a modus operendi for cultural critics" -- "It may be tiresome, but I suppose it's only just that their tools should be turned against them." No, what's just is for everyone to try their disinterested best to get things right -- witness Chris Albertson's Bessie Smith bio, for example. Also, when you focus on overturning prior biases, it's easy to miss potentially important aspects of the piece of the cultural past you're looking at that don't show up on that particular radar screen, now matter how you squiggle around with the "tendentiousness" factor. For instance, a crucial little (actually not so little) point I ran across today in Donald Clarke's excellent Frank Sinatra bio, "All or Nothing At All." Writing of the big Sinatra-T. Dorsey hit "I'll Never Smile Again," Clarke says: "It is a story song, almost harking back to the Tin Pan Alley of the turn of the century (which EVERYONE STILL REMEMBERED in 1940...)" (My emphasis.) Likewise, perhaps, from a piece I once wrote about the early '30s Gershwin musicals "Of Thee I Sing" and "Let 'Em Eat Cake": "Both the plots and the music of these shows allude to idealized conventions of heroism and romantic love that were, from the vantage point of the early 1930s, felt to be comically outmoded--although these conventions were still familiar enough, alive enough, that references to them could be meaningfully humorous or charming. Consider 'A Kiss for Cinderella' from Of Thee I Sing, which President John P. Wintergreen delivers just before he and Mary Turner are married. It’s a takeoff, as Ira Gershwin has said, 'on the bachelor-farewell type of song, best exemplified by John Golden and Ivan Caryll’s ‘Goodbye Girls, I’m Through’ (Chin-Chin, 1914).' So, at least for a 1931 audience, the meaning of 'Cinderella' cannot be separated from the song’s network of allusions--which places ironic quotation marks around Wintergreen’s adieu to his former girlfriends, while it also permits some genuine wistfulness about his impending marriage to seep through (an emotion that would emerge in a quite different way if Wintergeen directly stated it)." Etc. The point is that the piece of the cultural past we're looking at isn't (or isn't necessarily) looking forward, at us. It may be looking backwards, into its past or pasts (or its conceptions of the past), it may be looking sideways or obliquely in several different directions at once -- looking wherever it found or felt there to be meaning. And we'd better damn well be curious and scrupulous about these sorts of things, because this is just the sort stuff that gets lost and is forever forgotten, especially when we're all het up about "correcting" the last wave of our supposedly tendentious predecessors in the reacting to culture business.

Sure, some important facts usually remain to be uncovered, and sometimes new frameworks help to make better sense of what's there, but even though I've yet to read these books, I get the feeling from this piece of a new wave of academics and the like trying very hard to stake out turf, with a revisionist "everyone before me (or us) got it wrong, and for tendentious reasons" stance being a familiar way to go about that.

As an interactive words/music unit, "I've Got You Under My Skin" is pretty fantastic. Try to sing it yourself -- it's a kick.

Related to this, very good, and worth tracking down is R. Serge Denisoff's (love that name) "Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left" (U. of Illinois Press, 1971).

Hajdu's "Lush Life" is good on Strayhorn the person, but on the music Van de Leur's "The Music of Billy Strayhorn" is essential. He goes into it deeply and authoritatively (especially when it comes to Ellington vs. Strayhorn attribution -- Hajdu isn't reliable here).

Dick-sucking aside, I meant to suggest something fairly specific: That at at least one period in his career, Miles was trying to handle the trumpet a fair bit differently than it had been in jazz by and large in an attempt to realize a musical concept he had that also was a fair bit different than what most other people were playing, and that you can hear the (somewhat novel) trumpet-handling side and the (somewhat novel) musical-concept side of what he was up to really began to come together/talk to each other on those Birdland 1951 airchecks. And then there were obviously times later on when Miles' musical concept (and/or his Magus-like impulses--there were times when it seemed that Miles real instrument was The Persona) led him to handle the trumpet in ways that were utterly OTHERWISE, or even to just go over to a keyboard. But IMO he changed the instrument quite a bit for quite deliberate MUSICAL reasons. As Pres said in that famous Jazz Hot interview: "I got my tenor to sound like an alto, to sound like a tenor, to sound like a bass, and I'm not through with it yet."

Should really do a week or two of solid listening before opening my yap here, but I'd say that Miles the trumpet player and Miles the musician (or musical thinker) have not always been the same thing (not to mention Miles the actual or would-be Magus, or what you will -- a case certainly can be made that there were times when that to some extent extra-musical side of Miles was shaping his musical choices, also to some extent). Back to the trumpet player and the musician not always being in the same place, one of the things that makes that Birdland 1951 material so fascinating is that I think you can hear the two things coming together in his playing as they haven't really before--i.e. Miles has a concept, a way he wants the music as a whole to go, that was realized a fair bit before, in some of his Birth of the Cool solos (plues the overall sound of that band), but he didn't at that time have quite enough control of his horn (and/or enough of a concept of the way he wanted to wield his horn if he could--he was doing some pioneer concept work in both realms) to bring it all off. Now, in '51, it's definitely beginning to happen, and it's like you not only can hear it happening but also hear what a kick it is for Miles that his horn concept, his music concept, and his control of the horn are all coming together. (Off the top of my head again, I'd say that the mingled concepts were to get a kind of Pres-like, long-lined lyrical, saxophonish flow going, with an almost French horn-like, shaded mellowness of timbre always available -- nothing automatically brassy or sharply accented, which is what the horn virtually demands of a lot of players under certain conditions.) That wholeness of Miles' trumpet/overall music concepts lasts a fair amount of time (the "When Lights Are Low" solo on "Cookin'" is a great example -- wonderful "song-writing" that's inseparable from his singing trumpet concept/execution), but I guess you could date the dawn of another stage of Miles, and/or a possible partial separation of his music and trumpet concepts, with all the Harmon mute-into-the-mike playing that dawned in that period. That is, of course, a trumpet sound in one sense -- a trumpet is what's being used -- but isn't it more a "sound" sound, so to speak, even the first intimations of Miles the Magus in its highly dramatized, almost cinematic intimacy? Can't push this further at the moment, and maybe I should have done all that re-listening first, but I wonder what a Miles maven like JimS thinks.

FWIW, two statements by Ron Carter about the '65-'68 quintet: "..we (i.e. Shorter, Carter, Hancock, and Williams) had all kind of decided on our kind of groove before we joined the band. Obviously Miles saw that we had something to offer before we joined, or he wouldn't have asked us." "Sixty percent of this was the band taking a new direction and forty percent was Miles recognizing this, and, while not being able to predict it would go a certain way, understanding that it was definitely taking a turn. I think he was happy to take a back seat and be an inspiration but not hold the reins too tight, and give the horses their head, knowing that it would work out all right." I think that view of how things went is accurate up to a point (i.e. to some degree and up to a certain time) but with "Filles" and especially "In a Silent Way." Miles has moved to the front seat and taken a tight hold on the reins. Yes, I know that much of this music sounds "loose," but it's loose within boundaries that Miles has drawn.

In the "Can-E-Ball Naturally" vein of sophisticated humor, I remember a friend in high school who envisioned a band featuring Furtive Cruller and You-Shit-A-Heap.

JohnJ -- For some reason I don't recall right now, that Clarke-Boland review didn't make it into the book, maybe because some of the thoughts I had there were recycled a bit in a late-'90s piece about the Jim McNeely-Vanguard Orchestra album "Lickety Split." Also, forgot to say thanks to Paul Secor.

Thanks, JohnS, Jim S., and B-3er (from the "Nessa spam" thread) -- writing those "All Music" notes back then was almost as exciting as listening to the music being made, under intermittently stressful conditions (as I've been reminded and to some extent recall) that finally yielded glorious results (am sure I've never heard time float like it does on "317 E. 32nd"). Of other notes I've done, I'm happiest about the longish ones for the Mosaic Tristano-Konitz-Marsh set, the recent reissue of "Filles de Kilimanjaro" (with an assist by Jim S.), and the notes for a 1972 reissue of Rollins' "Worktime" that I still think say something fairly novel and useful about his music. All of them, and a whole lot of other stuff, will be in my (ahem) forthcoming book "Jazz In Search of Itself," due in fall 2004 from Yale U. Press (about the same time Dan's tome will arrive -- I told him we should set up a dual book-signing tour).

I believe Dan's book is due in October from Norton -- maybe 600 pages worth. I'll let everyone know when I find out more details.

McKusick fans might want to check out altoist Allan Chase's two interesting albums on Accurate -- "Dark Clouds with Silver Linings" and "Phoenix." Now dean of faculty at the New England Conservatory (and husband of talented singer Dominique Eade), Chase sounds a good bit like McKusick at times, though he told me that he didn't hear McKusick's music until he'd worked out his own thing and that the player he tried very hard to emulate when growing up was Gary Bartz! Also, don't miss that McKusick on OJC with Paul Chambers, Charlie Persip, and Eddie Costa. It's a little later than and a little different from the RCA material.

If you can find them, check out David A. Himmelstein's over-the-top notes for Booker Ervin's "Setting the Pace" with Dexter Gordon (Prestige). They're a three-act play. I particularly like the reference to Dexter as "the only man in the world who can walk in a sitting position." Dan Morgensterns' notes are usually like having a infinitely knowledgable best friend at your elbow. BTW, a big collection of the best of Dan's writing will be published in the fall.

Relaxin' is more of a "fun" program -- not only is every track fine, but the whole thing flows -- yet and yet Cookin' reaches higher peaks of intensity (e.g. Miles' solo on "When Lights Are Low"). A tie.

K. Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, with L. Armstrong and the Dodds brothers, at the Lincoln Gardens in Chicago in 1922 -- not only because the band was so damn important but also because there's every reason to think that there was a big gap between how the band sounded on the stand and how it sounds on its dim (acoustic) recordings.

Eric -- This paragraph you quote from James Rozzi ("Or, using a lower common denominator, how about this, from a likewise- minded "student of jazz" who grew up in the New York of the 1930s, 40s and 5Os? "I remember going to Birdland and hearing Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. They all had nice suits on. One group in particular had really nice suits on. You know, every time I hear a lot of those Blue Note Records (Blakey was recording for Blue Note at the time), I always envision them in those same suits because they play so fixed and so tight and arranged... Herbie Hancock too, all of them...even though they all play such great solos. Herbie Hancock could have been in the same suit Horace Silver was in... or Bobby Timmons.") not only contradicts what Rozzi quotes from Bob Weinstock and Ira Gitler but also doesn't fit the overall point you seem to be making. That is, the characterization of Blakey et al. by this "likewise- minded 'student of jazz'" fits no contemporary image of so-called East Coast jazz that I'm aware of (certainly not Weinstock's or Gitler's), and it's also factually quite goofy -- as their recordings make clear, the Jazz Messengers and related bands of that time did not, comparatively speaking, play "so fixed and so tight and arranged," quite the contrary. But ""so fixed and so tight and arranged" DOES fit the cliche of what West Coast jazz supposedly was like. Who the heck is this Mr. Rizzo and his "likewise- minded 'student of jazz'"? Neither one knows what he's talking about.

Eric -- This paragraph you quote from James Rozzi ("Or, using a lower common denominator, how about this, from a likewise- minded "student of jazz" who grew up in the New York of the 1930s, 40s and 5Os? "I remember going to Birdland and hearing Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. They all had nice suits on. One group in particular had really nice suits on. You know, every time I hear a lot of those Blue Note Records (Blakey was recording for Blue Note at the time), I always envision them in those same suits because they play so fixed and so tight and arranged... Herbie Hancock too, all of them...even though they all play such great solos. Herbie Hancock could have been in the same suit Horace Silver was in... or Bobby Timmons.") not only contradicts what Rozzi quotes from Bob Weinstock and Ira Gitler but also doesn't fit the overall point you seem to be making. That is, the characterization of Blakey et al. by this "likewise- minded 'student of jazz'" fits no contemporary image of so-called East Coast jazz that I'm aware of (certainly not Weinstock's or Gitler's), and it's also factually quite goofy -- as their recordings make clear, the Jazz Messengers and related bands of that time did not, comparatively speaking, play "so fixed and so tight and arranged," quite the contrary. But ""so fixed and so tight and arranged" DOES fit the cliche of what West Coast jazz supposedly was like. Who the heck is this Mr. Rizzo and his "likewise- minded 'student of jazz'"? Neither one knows what he's talking about.

FWIW, Astrud inspired what may be the second-goofiest sentence in "The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz" -- "Her work often has an economy of melodic line and a steady momentum akin to that of Basie, but its rhythmic drive is often devoid of contours." (Author of the entry is Marty Hatch, otherwise unknown to me.) The goofiest? Without doubt the last sentence of Scott Yanow's entry on Joe Maini -- "He died after losing a game of Russian roulette."

I remember hearing Anderson at Chicago sessions in '57-'58 and thinking that because of his frailty (he had to be helped up onto the bandstand and to the piano bench) it would be a miracle if he were alive in ten years. He's probably outlived almost everyone else on the bandstand and three-quarters of the people in the room. I used to have a copy of the Jazzland LP (it perished in a basement flood) and recall that it didn't come very close to his in-person effect. He was a sound/dynamics/chord-voicing player par excellence -- subtly shifting pastels -- and I recall that the date was set up along more standard "blowing" lines. Someone (don't recall who) once claimed that Anderson was a source for Vanguard-era Bill Evans.

Overton's "Pulsations" is even better than I remembered. His final work, it's stylistically akin to Stefan Wolpe's great Quartet for Trumpet, Tenor Saxophone, Piano and Percussion (1950). It's for chamber ensemble (number of players not specified in the liner notes, but it sounds like about 12 -- maybe five strings [including both arco and pizzicato bass], two woodwinds, tpt., trb., piano, and percussion), lasts 17 minutes, and is based, says the composer, "largely on a strong, steady beat." Though I wouldn't call that beat "steady" by jazz norms, its definitely active at all times (again, akin to to the way Wolpe's Quartet works.) The piece seems more loosely knit than Wolpe's, but I think that was Overton's intent -- I especially like its enigmatic sotto voce conclusion -- and while there are a few moments that smack of the generic gestural modernism of the time, I'd say its a heck a lot more personal and potent than anything I've ever heard from, say, Charles Wourinen. Wish there were more Overton available, though I guess "Pulsations" isn't available now. At least it was recorded.