Larry Kart

As Bertrand said -- nobody who loves Shorter should miss "The Soul Man." Must have been one of those ideal days in the studio, everyone perfectly attuned to each other and relaxed.

Miles is in great form (at once playing hard and thinking hard about how he wants to play, or so it seems--he's definitely on the move here), Blakey fortunately is close to the mike, and Kenny Drew is really locked in. A strong feeling of that specific wedge of the past, too. A feast.

Seems to me that the big "problem" with late Trane ("problem" is in quotes because IMO it is a problem from one point of view, but may not be from another, or from others) has to do with this (to quote from something I wrote): "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." Nothing wrong with abandoning (or stepping aside from) the metrical framework IMO -- and you can argue that this was for some players at that time an absolutely necessary, logical step. The problem (or "problem") is, when you step away from the metrical framework, what (in specific musical terms) do you have left? What Cecil Taylor or Albert Ayler or Roscoe Mitchell or Evan Parker had left was IMO more than enough; no one could say that Taylor's or Ayler's or Mitchell's Parker's musics (each different from the others) weren't brimful of urgent rhythmic information. In late, post-metric Trane, though, where is the meaningful rhythmic information? Is it there, but I can't hear it? Or is that the weight of the music is being placed in other realms, and if so, where and how? Over the years, I've come up lots of "yes" and "no" and "I don't know" answers (and with lots of examples to back up how I felt). But I don't have an answer that feels right and probably never will.

If you need another tenorman, Clifford Solomon, who can be heard on Tadd Dameron's "Fontainebleau."

Paar's blend of smarminess, rampant insecurity, megalomania, and corny sentiment always made me throw up. I remember at the time feeling that his advent and the grip he established on a goodsized portion of the American public was an ominous sign -- of what, I can't say for sure, but I'd bet that a lot of really nasty stuff in the world of celebritydom/entertainment could be traced back to his example.

Another clue as to what the problems/limitations of some Collectables releases might stem from. Today I bought the John Lewis Golden Striker/Gunther Schuller Jazz Abstractions compilation because my copy of JA went missing some years ago. Comparing the Collectables Golden Striker to my clean old (but mono) original LP was a shock. The CD was harsh, blare-y, almost airless (the original sound edged over in that direction -- that was often Atlantic's house style, as I recall -- but not like this) and lacked low- and high-end definition. Then in the liner notes I saw "special thanks" to two record stores that specialize in o.o.p. jazz, Rochester, N.Y.'s The Bop Shop and Pittsburgh's The Attic. That suggests that the GS tracks (maybe the JA ones too) are dubs from LPs, probably because, even though the stuff is licensed from Atlantic, the original tapes were victims of Atlantic's famous warehouse fire.

Also, among players whose honking made them famous -- don't forget Flip Phillips. It was the battles between Phillips and Jacquet that made Jazz at the Philharmonic a big success. Much of the JATP audience was waiting for the honks, and when they came, so did the audience. Or so it sounds.

In the name of historical accuracy, the primordial honker in terms of influence (though of course he was much more than a honker) was Lester Young. See p. 49-50 of Lewis Porter's fine Young bio. Porter notes that Young probably picked up the device from Jimmy Dorsey, who used it on record as early as 1930, "but Young was the one who influenced hundreds of other jazz players to adopt it." Porter also is precise about what a honk is: "Normally one approaches the lowest register of the saxophone cautiously, using a controlled embouchere and a moderate air flow to minimize the contrast with the middle register. The honk is a conscious exploitation of that contrast. The player loosens his embouchere and speeds up his air flow."

About Coltrane maybe getting hung up/confused during his solo on "Nita," the part I mean is the approximately five-second pause he takes beginning at 3:55. At that tempo five seconds is a pretty long time. I'd be curious, if I'm right, what the specific source of his confusion/indecision might have been.Did he lose track of the form? The changes? Or perhaps it was that he realized at that moment that the idea that was in his mind/fingers probably wouldn't fit. Of the other soloists (Byrd, Burrell, Silver) the one who sounds most at ease with the piece IMO is Burrell.

Seems to me that Coltrane gets a bit hung up/hesitant/confused (along the lines brought up in Jim Sangrey's post) on his own piece "Nita" on "Whims of Chambers." As Lewis Porter says in his Coltrane bio, "Nita" is a pretty complex structure for blowing, in terms of both form and harmony.

Bought the Hasaan album back then and have always loved it. The Elmo Hope relationship that Chuck mentioned is definitely there, but I also hear a strong kinship to Herbie Nichols (even if Hasaan didn't hear him much or at all) because the typical Hasaan and Nichols performance doesn't give you a tune first, then improvisation on the tune feel -- it's like the piece itself is omnipresent, a la the great stride players, but with a modern, semi-fractured sensibility that grows more fractured as Hasaan elaborates on the initial design. Admittedly, in Hassan's case, this can border on the oppressive/obssessive at times (which IMO is never the case with Nichols, with all his wit and humor), but I assume that's who Hasaan was. BTW, the Hasaan album is essential for Max admirers--he plays his ass off on it.

The legislator did say that the results of this case were not what he had in mind for the law, but that's why such moral grandstanding, mandatory sentence laws are not a good idea.

FWIW (I think it's just a ghastly irony) if I understood last night's NBC Evening News story on this case correctly, the Georgia legislator who was the driving force behind the aggravated child molestation law under which Dixon was sentenced is black.

I'm pretty sure that guitar distortion problem is on the original LP.

FWIW, "Jordu" bears a strong resemblance to "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Grieg's "Peer Gynt Suite."

Deus -- Glad you like that Wilson set. It was a revelation to me, and I already had the Mosaic. About Collectables sound in general, I think it's hard to generalize. I'm pretty sure they do some noise reduction sometimes, but on the others Collectables I have (the Gullin, Art Farmer's "Sing Me Soft of the Blues" etc., an Elvin Jones on Atlantic compilation), either I don't have the LP originals with which to make a comparison, or my LP originals are in sad shape). By and large, I'd say that if the material appeals, take a chance. We're not likely to see any of this stuff repackaged/remastered again for some time, if ever.

That N. Adderley band on the early '80s with Fortune was something else. Fortune and the rhythm section (Larry Willis, Walter Booker, Jimmy Cobb) were locked tight and on fire. Likewise, a somewhat earlier Charles Sullivan-Fortune band I caught live in Chicago, with another fine rhythm section (Juney Booth is the only name I recall). That was the first time I heard Sullivan, who seemed like he might be Booker Little reincarnated.

I've got a copy, and it's definitely worth a listen. Overtly commercial in one sense in an almost Enoch Light manner (there's a phrase in producer Teo Macero's notes that will curl your hair, something like don't be afraid of this jazz stuff, folks -- we took out all the parts you don't like), it has one main point of interest IMO: several "solos" that Carisi wrote out for the massed-guitar ensemble. Handsomely played, they're also nice instances of C's linear thinking at work, unencumbered by his limitations as a trumpeter (at least by this time in his career, though he does take a few tasty melody choruses). The other solos by Brookmeyer and Woods are nice examples of their work of the period.

Most of Bauer's recordings are as a sideman with Lennie Tristano and/or Lee Konitz in the '40s and '50s. He made one album under his own name for Clef or Norgran in about '57 that came out as a Verve Select a few years ago and is probably out of print. Bauer had a very rich chromatic approach that, like Ellman's, allows for a lot of what might be called ambiguous or "evenhanded" motion i.e. harmonically, at just about any moment, up can turn into down, forward into backward, etc. Bauer was born in 1915, and I believe he's still around. He did a lot of teaching in later years and wrote several guitar method books; if Ellman and Jeff Parker do know of his approach, it may be through those books. Listening again to the album, I bet they got Ellman's sound about right, but I've heard Shim and drummer Eric Harland live, and they do sound damped down a fair bit here -- lacking in sizzle, space, and overtones (Shim live may have more overtones going for him than any tenorman since Ike Quebec).

P.S. As far as Ellman's sources, I have an odd feeling that, like Chicago's Jeff Parker, he's been listening some to guys like Billy Bauer, maybe even to Louis Mecca and Joe Cinderella (onetime assopciates of '50s composer-baritonist Gil Melle). Of course, it's possible these days, with the music's history folding back on itself multiple times, that guys can sound like they've been listening to players they've never even heard of. But I've been that Jeff Parker does know his Billy Bauer.

Bought the record for Mark Shim, and now I like the leader too, but that's a pretty dull, thumpy recording job -- courtesy of Kurt Lundvall. Not as bad as Lundvall's much lambasted, virtually unlistenable Lovano Nonet at the Vanguard work, but I think this one could have, should have, had a lot more zest and presence to it. With a fair amount of dial twisting I can compensate a bit, but only so much.

Yes, I'm pretty sure I was there that day when Ran was at Chuck's apartment with the rest of the Chicago jazz mafia (Terry M., John L., Chuck) of the time (though not the late J. Figi). Great guy, fine musician, and somewhere between a musician and fan in attitude -- talking about the music in an unguarded way was/is a natural thing for him. Did an interview with him around that time. Here it is: Describing Ran Blake’s music is no easy task, because there are few precedents in jazz, or anywhere else, for what he tries to do when he sits down at the keyboard. Those who are familiar with the world of twentieth-century classi-cal composition may feel for a while that Blake belongs in that bag, as they hear crashing dis-sonances and turbulent rhythms that could have come from Bela Bartok, plus a dark, heavily chromatic harmonic sense that is reminiscent of early Arnold Schoenberg or Charles Ives. But then one becomes aware that Blake’s music includes some very "unclassical" components and techniques. For one thing, it is almost total-ly improvised and can refer quite naturally to black gospel music and to a host of other "native American" sounds--movie sound tracks, old pop tunes, and the compositions of such jazz masters as Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and George Russell--as well as to the non-American music of Greek composer Mikas Theodorakis and the tangos of Argentina. Given that wide (and potentially wild) sonic melange, it’s no wonder that Blake is the chair-man of the Third Stream Depart-ment at the New England Con-servatory of Music--a dedicated proselytizer for a way of playing and listening that was first formulated in 1960 by one of Blake’s mentors, composer Gunther Schuller. As Schuller conceived it, Third Stream music was supposed to fuse "the improvisational spon-taneity and rhythmic vitality of jazz with the compositional pro-cedures and techniques acquired in Western music during its seven hundred years of development." But why, Blake wondered, must the tributary streams "represent only classical and jazz?" A third-stream musician before the term was coined, Blake had been tos-sing together supposedly incompatible sounds since childhood and coming up with some strange and startling results. Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1935 and reared in Hartford, Connecticut, Blake began to play the piano at age three, trying, he recalls, to "tell stories with strange chords." This basically programmatic approach to music has never left him, and it was reinforced many times over when Blake began to haunt local movie theaters, fas-cinated by the relationship be-tween what he saw on the screen and the films’ mood-evoking sound track scores. "As a kid I would spend hours listening to Bartok and Ives and gospel music," Blake says, "and then I’d sit down at the piano and try to recreate the dark Gothic mood of [the film] Spiral Stair-case with Dorothy McGuire, like an Edgar Allan Poe story set to music. What I was playing was an essentially white European music, but because it was totally improvised, I was using some of the techniques of a jazz person, even though what I was doing wasn’t in thirty-two-bar form with a flowing, Bud Powell-like line. There were very few models for me. I knew about Duke and Strayhorn, but as fine a pianist as Duke became later on, he used his pen and I did not. I’d also heard [Thelonius] Monk and fell in love with him immediate-ly, but quite often there was a rhythm section with him, and rhythm sections and I didn’t get along very well. I guess because I played so many funny chords, bass players automatically didn’t like me, and drummers didn’t like me either." Drawn to jazz but not sure that he belonged there, Blake studied with a number of jazz-oriented teachers, including John Mehegan, Bill Russo, Mal Waldron, John Lewis, Mary Lou Williams, and Oscar Peterson. But it wasn’t until he met Schuller in the late 1950s, when the third-stream idea was taking shape, that Blake realized that it was all right to be what he was --a musical "hybrid animal." Schuller’s guidance and sup-port led in 1962 to Blake’s first album, a still startling creation titled The Newest Sound Around that paired him with vocalist Jeanne Lee. Blake and Lee had begun to work together when they were students at Bard College, and their intuitive, free-form inter-play on such songs as "Laura" and "Summertime" might be de-scribed as a meeting between a Monk-influenced Bartok and a surrealistic Sarah Vaughan. Blake made several more ad-venturous recordings in the 1960s, but he wasn’t heard from again on record until the late 1970s, having devoted most of his energies in the meantime to the New England Conservatory’s Third Stream Department--a unique educational effort and one that is inseparable from the music that Blake himself is creating these days. "The department," Blake says, "is eleven years old, and Schuller started it with me. The term ‘third stream’ began as a noun, referring to Gunther’s music and John Lewis.’ Now I use it as a verb --to ‘third stream’ or just ‘to stream’--because what we’re re-ally interested in is the process by which musicians find a personal voice. Our goal is for everybody, upon graduation, to come out with a musical self-portrait." Fundamental to the develop-ment of a truly personal musical style, Blake believes, is a lot of ear training--not in the conventional sense of the term but ear training as a disciplined, from the inside out exposure to a variety of musical styles. "The best kind of mayonnaise is homemade," Blake says, "and the best kind of music starts from scratch, so I might take the first-year students and have them learn a Billie Holiday piece totally by ear, singing along with her. All these bass players and guitarists who can do flashy runs, it’s very hard for them to get down and sing ‘You Stepped Out of a Dream’ at a slow tempo. But when they’ve really learned that by ear, I think they know something that they can’t get from learning the hippest way to arpeggiate a chord." In other words, Blake and his colleagues are reinventing the wheel--trying to recreate, within a more-or-less disciplined academic framework, the free flow of musical-cultural information that used to prevail in this coun-try and that has since fallen prey to the standardization of the music industry and the standar-dization of most music-education programs. Of course, only a time machine will take you back to the New Orleans of Louis Armstrong, the Kansas City of Charlie Parker or the Chicago of Mahalia Jackson, and Blake doesn’t pretend to be a wizard who can teach what can’t be taught. What he can do, though, is expose his students to a lot of vital music that they otherwise might not hear and expose them to it in a way that leads to insight, not facile imita-tion. "Young players love quick virtuosity," Blake says, "and a lot of audiences do, too. But I think students should do more than play written down Phil Woods. They need the whole vitamin regimen, not just vitamin C. God forbid that I get a lot of students who want to be Ran Blake imitators, because the last thing I want to be is a guru--or maybe I do, but with a small ‘g.’ I hate patterns, yet I know that what I’m doing, encouraging young musicians to break the rules, can lead to the formation of still other rules. You get some people who totally want to follow and live off what the teacher says, and if that’s not what you’re demand-ing, they’ll leave you and find somone else who really is a guru. Then you’ll get the student who says, ‘To hell with you, everybody over thirty is obsolete--I just want to get my electric bass polished today and sleep late.’ The way I try to do it, teaching is very hard, like walking a tightrope." Perhaps the best evidence that the tightrope can be walked is Blake’s own music, for, as he himself might admit, he re-mains a post-graduate Third Stream student, exploring and personalizing all sorts of influences. One of his recent albums, Duke Dreams is both a heartfelt tribute to the music of Ellington and Billy Strayhorn and a shrewd, often programmatic commentary on their art. "It’s about the dark magic of their relationship," Blake ex-plains, "plus an act of mourning for them. On [strayhorn’s] ‘Something to Live For,’ there s a gloomy passage where I use chords that ... well, when I played it I actually saw flashes of this man on the steps of a church and then of a casket passing by." Also in the "dark magic" vein is Blake’s Film Noir, a return to the dramatic movie music that fascinated him as a child. An album guaranteed to make your hair stand on end, Film Noir includes bizarre versions of the theme songs from All About Eve, Streetcar Named Desire, The Pawnbrok-er and Pinky, plus Blake’s personal salutes to such cinema-tic netherworlds as Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, Fritz Lang’s Doktor Mabuse, and Claude Chabrol’s Le Boucher. "I love the risk of improvising," Blake says, "the naked moments," and it is those moments that make his music special, for his risks and revela-tions sound like no one else’s. "If you develop your own unique sound," Blake once wrote in an essay about Third Stream music, though he could have been speaking of himself, "it may take you longer to get a break, but you cannot be re-placed so easily. And there is some security in not being forgotten." 1983

A London anecdote by way of trombonist Milt Bernhart. Bernhart was with B. Goodman in '48-'49 when the band was invited over to actor Jack Webb's apartment after a stage show for a party. Webb, a big jazz fan but one whose tastes were exclusively Dixieland, was married to London at the time, and at some point in the evening she went over to the record player, took off whatever Webb was playing (Eddie Condon, I think) and replaced it with a Charlie Parker disc -- something that Webb did not appreciate. Bernhart says that he remembers thinking right then and there that the London-Webb marriage wasn't long for this world. FWIW, I also recall reading that the London-Bobby Troup marriage was an exceptionally good one.

Nate, that's exactly my impression of Vandermark. Yes, his heart is in the right place, and he's done a lot for the Chicago avant-garde (or whatever you want to call it) scene in terms of boosting and showcasing other usually younger players, but many of those players are a lot more interesting musically than he is.

THE "JFK" QUINTET New Jazz Frontiers from Washington OJCCD-1924-2 (Riverside 9396) ~ $14.98 The young men who comprised the JFK Quintet were looking for greater freedom of expression while never forgetting the elemental black music of their Southern upbringings. The result was a blues-inflected music under the spell of developments put forward by Ornette Coleman and by Miles Davis and Bill Evans in the Davis band that included John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. It was Adderley who discovered the band in Washington, D.C. and brought them to public attention by way of this recording. Saxophonist Andrew White went on to become one of the primary chroniclers and transcribers of Coltrane's work. Trumpeter Ray Codrington later recorded with Eddie Harris. Walter Booker, Jr. became Adderley's bassist. Inspired by President John F. Kennedy's concern with new ideas and new policies, they incorporated his initials into the name of their group. Aw-ite, Eugly's Tune, Hominy Grits, Dancing in the Dark, Cici's Delight, Nairod, Polka Dots and Moonbeams, Delories Ray Codrington, Andrew White, Harry Killgo, Walter Booker, Jr., Carl "Mickey" Newman