Larry Kart

If I were a cat, Bill Coleman would make me want to roll over on my back and purr. Another fine player from that era, though perhaps not quite of Coleman's stature, was Shad Collins.

Don Fagerquist. Sort of a cross between Dizzy Gillespie and Bobby Hackett, if you can imagine that.

Sorry to sneak beyond the time frame, but two of this guy's greatest albums were recorded in the '60s, or maybe the late '50s. Charlie Shavers. Yes, he had a taste problem at times, but when he was on -- my God! The albums are as a sideman: "Hawk Eyes" under Coleman Hawkins' name (the fours on the title track!) and Hal Singer's "Blue Stompin.'" Both originally on Swingville; the former's on OJC and the later may be too.

I heard that same Jazz Fest jam session set and thought Brown was kind of jive but also felt that it wasn't a setting where you could be sure about anything.

Clunky -- I mean that there was a kind of big band writing that could be heard a lot in the '50s on both coasts that seemed to draw heavily on the Basie and Herman streams and the Lunceford too (as filtered through Kenton perhaps). One good example might be Shorty Rogers' "Shorty Courts the Count," where brash Kenton-Lunceford brassiness (Maynard Ferguson is on board as I recall) is tacked onto '30s Basie material, arguably to rather decadent and/or inorganic effect. This, BTW, in contrast IMO to the attractive cleverness/brashness of some of Rogers other work of the time or just before that time -- you get the feeling that something was rapidly getting overripe in that corner of the music back then. (Part of the overripeness probably stemmed from the fact that so many of the section players in those '50s bands were so much more virtuosic than their '30s and early '40s predecessors that it was tempting to write for them in a way that placed more weight on volume and upper register effects than on groove considerations and the like.) I'm also thinking of East Coast things of the time like Manny Albam's "Drum Suite." Another example of what might have been at stake around then would be a Fresh Sounds Med Flory LP. The first date is by a 1954 NY-based rehearsal band; it sounds utterly at home in a Herman-Basie groove (there's a great Al Cohn chart here, "No Thanks"); this is the music of the present for these guys. Next two dates are on the West Coast from 1956 and '57, by the rehearsal band that would become the core of the Terry Gibbs band. The style of the music is much the same, but the sensibility has changed; now everything is kind of inside quotation marks. (Actually, this would be less the case when Gibbs took over, thanks I would guess to his sheer animal magnetism.)

Brownie: Is "Experiment in Sound" the same album as the one I have on Jasmine under the name "Walk Softly -- Run Wild"? It's basically the same band as on "Wide Range." Also, the beginning of "Nipigon" on "Wide Range" -- austere theme statement (and what a memorable line!) into Gene Quill's squawling alto solo -- is one of the great moments in '50s big band jazz IMO. The level of execution and commitment from Richards' players has always struck as exceptional by the standards of that era or any other. In the notes to a reissue of "Something Else," Richie Kamuca perhaps alludes to what lay behind that, speaking of the immense respect the guys he wrote for had for Richards. For my taste, the balls-out, theatrical goofiness/deleriousness of some of Richards' ideas saved him from the neo-Basie/Herman/Lunceford but much louder and with higher brass stuff that made a lot of '50s big band writing so dull and/or oppressive.

Tooter -- I think I know what you mean about Clark Terry and agree up to a point. Reviewing him several years in a row when he came into town in the '80s, it was hard not to notice how casual he was about paying attention to the shape of his lines in the moment; he had, a la Harry Edison perhaps, so many stock devices (most of them more or less attractive) that he usually just strung them together--this being especially evident when you heard him on a semi-regular basis. Then one time he was paired with Al Cohn (Clark usually worked as a single), and because Al only had one gear -- all out -- Clark was led/forced to shift into that gear too, and the results were startlingly different. Recordings of Terry at that level don't lie think upon the ground in my experience -- his old Emarcy album Swahili is one and of course his Riverside with Monk. Don't have any of the albums of the old Terry/Bookmeyer quintet any more but recall that he was in top form on some of those tracks (a candidate for reissue?)

Philly -- Charles Sullivan played in pit orchestras on Broadway from 1981-95, according to the notes for his nice 1996 Arabesque album, Kamau, with Craig Handy, Kenny Barron, Rodney Whittaker, and Victor Lewis. (Kamua Adilifua is Sullivan's new name; don't know what he's doing now that he's left the Broadway field.) I heard him with that Sonny Fortune band, too. He sounded -- to borrow a phrase someone once applied to Jean-Pierre Rampal -- like he was using bottled air; when did he breathe? A remarkable player, and if memory serves, a fair bit more fiery in-person with Fortune than he is on the Arabesque album, good though it is. BTW, Sullivan brings to mind another bottled-air guy, Carl Saunders. Definitely underrated, perhaps because he's such a great trumpeter player technically that you tend to think that he can't be that much of a thinker -- but at his best, I think he is.

There's also a nutty Bethlehem, "Something Else," from 1956 with one of the more alarming trumpet sections ever assembled -- Maynard F., Buddy Childers, Pete Candoli, Stu Williamson, and Shorty Rogers -- Stan Levey on drums, and strong solo work from Charlie Mariano and Richie Kamuca. Have never heard "The Rites of Diablo" but have heard good things about it.

An excellent Pickens trio album from 1987, "It's About Time" (Southport) may still be available. Two bass and drum teams -- Dan Shapera and Robert Shy, and Larry Gray and Wilbur Campbell. Pickens is a stone bebopper at heart, with personal Tynerish extensions. The relation between the internal rhythms of his phrases and the underlying beat used to strike me as bit skittery/slippery at times, like a guy who was running on ice, but either that was stupid on my part or Pickens got all that locked in place many years ago. Also impressive is his daughter Bethany Pickens.

Carl Woideck's "Charlie Parker: His Life and Music" (U of Michigan Press) is very good.

Jim -- Don't have the album anymore (bought when it came out and eventually dumped it) so I can't check memory against reality, but as I recall, in addition to my feelings about the uncomfortable mood of the date, the rather airless recording job did no favor to the tenormen. Is the CD sound better?

Leeway -- I'm a bit bewildered by your "I was also pleasantly surprised by Hines' piano playing. For some reason, maybe because I had only heard him at the end of his career, I didn't expect such hip playing." A strong case could be made that Hines was at a peak of inventiveness from his "rediscovery" in 1963 on to almost the very end in '83 -- particularly on the vast number of solo recordings he made during that period (though his working band in person was too close to a lounge act for my tastes). Also, if it's not too late, I'd avoid "Ben Webster and Associates." The lineup is great on paper, but it didn't work out that way IMO. The rhythm section is DOA for some reason (the pianist's comping as I recall was a sore spot -- either Oscar Peterson or Jimmy Jones [i like Jones better that Peterson by and large, but his feline obliqueness rubs some players the wrong way] -- and the none of the tenormen is at his best. For Budd of that era I'd go with the Swingville date for starters. It's also nice for Budd's trombonist brother Keg.

Oops -- I must have been thinking of two other single-word Raney titles from earlier on, "Signal" and "Minor," because I don't see any earlier recording of "Action."

Subhed on page 1 of today's Chicago Tribune, my alma mater: "Spec. Jarob Walsh was sent to his Illinois family to recover from his wounds. But he says the longer he stays, the deeper his sense of disconnect."

Listened again to the JA record. It's a lot like the Steeplechase duet album with Doug R. -- high-intensity improvising, and Raney's comping for himself (that track actually was laid down first) is far from vanilla. Fans of earlier Raney will be pleased to know that two of the pieces here are "The Flag Is Up" and "Action." "Blues Andante" makes clear, as much as Raney recording I can think of, how much Grant Green dug him. Also, the exposed format highlights one of Raney's key virtues IMO: As much as any player, the swing of his lines lies not so much in the attack/accent realm but in the progression of pitches, the way (like a lot of Bach) each note tugs against the harmonic gravity/rhythm this way or that and reshapes expectations of what's coming next.

Yes, but probably on a weeknight.

You know that Zeitlin, Williams, and Wilson will be at the Jazz Showcase this week, right?

I have a 1983 JA Records (Jamey Aebersold) album "Play Duets with Jimmy Raney." To quote the liner notes: "The right channel contains the melody and improvised choruses. The left channel contains the melody and comping choruses.... You can play either part by turning off the appropriate channel or enjoy the complete recording in stereo." So it's Raney improvising and comping for himself, and its top notch -- all Raney originals too. Maybe it's still available through Aebersold. BTW, while agreeing that Raney is a great guitarist, I also think of him as one of the greatest improvisers in jazz regardless of instrument.

Couw -- By and large I prefer the BN Jackie too; he'd grown, he'd learned, he was to some extent a different man, a better player. But he also was the same man, and the way the music tells the story of how he'd come to be the same but different is far from the least interesting story that music has to tell.

Oops -- pressed the wrong key. What I started to say, was: Don't want to get ponderous about this, but perhaps a la what Jim S. said, Prestige Jackie/Blue Note Jackie presents in especially stark form the autobiographical/personal historical factor in jazz -- both in playing it and listening to it. As I mentioned above, when I first heard the Prestige/New Jazz Jackie back in 1956, that was virtually all the Jackie there was, and that music leapt out of the speakers and grabbed me (and a lot of other people too) right by the throat. It was one of the REALEST damn things I'd ever heard, and emotional realism/truthtelling was one of the things I was hungry for in music and everywhere else I could find it (this was the mid-'50s after all) -- again, I'm pretty sure, like a lot of other listeners. The force and weight of Jackie's testimony of that time will never leave me (it sure didn't/couldn't leave him; he was living it!), and I believe it easily can be heard in his music of that time even if you you weren't around to hear it back then -- the whole context is built right into it. More than that, the fact of the Prestige Jackie, plus the fact of his then dropping off the scene, was a crucial part of the context for the early Blue Note Jackie -- for the joy and relative health/strength/ease of "Swing, Swang, Swingin'" and then for the conceptual breakthrough of "New Soil." Again, all of this is built into the music IMO, though I admit that Jackie is a pretty extreme case of this sort of thing.

Don't want to get ponderous about this, but perhaps a la what Jim .

P.S. It probably was the cover photo of "Jackie McLean and Co." more than anything else that led some to wonder about McLean's racial background.

This is a different Jackie than the early Blue Note McLean -- more acidic in tone, more awkward or laborious in phrasing (but expressively so), and probably more than a little strung out at times, but that's part of the story. Besides, it was this version of McLean that first grabbed me by the lapels and set the stage for his eventual dramatic BN re-emergence, because by then a fair number of us thought that we might never hear from him again. My favorite Prestige is "Jackie McLean and Co." -- with Bill Hardman, Ray Draper, Mal Waldron, Doug Watkins, and Art Taylor. Every track works, but the early McLean performances par excellence IMO are the slow minor blues "Help," where Jackie's solo sounds like a literal cry for...., and "Beau Jack," where he begins by worrying a single jagged phrase almost to a point beyond what seems imaginable or even bearable -- but then from the point of view of what's being expressed, that's the point. Another very good album is the somewhat earlier "Lights Out" -- with Donald Byrd, Elmo Hope, Watkins, and Taylor -- especially the title track, before which the lights were dimmed in the studio to enhance the mood.

My guess is that Giddins didn't really have much to say about Waller and Miller as a pair once he got past the accidental identity of their birth dates and death dates, so he simply mugged up some thumb-sucking platitudes -- e.g. that final sentence ("Waller and Miller provide an unexpected service: they humble critical stereotypes and show ways that jazz and pop once enriched each other, and might still") -- that really don't mean much of anything but sound like they should. I wouldn't be surprised if this piece were an idea that a New Yorker editor foisted upon Giddins, and he decided to run with it -- right into a wall. It's one of many journalists' diseases; I've done similar things myself and hated myself in the morning. If the idea came from elsewhere, perhaps Giddins thought that this might be the first of many New Yorker gigs for him and didn't want to turn it down. If the idea was his own, maybe he thought it was just the kind of broad brush "think piece" that general interest magazines tend to like.