Larry Kart

About the realism of the Tunis books, "The Kid from Tomkinsville" includes a savage portrait of Leo Durocher as the Dodgers' near-psychotic lying weasel of a manager, "Gabby." Tunis had a nice gift with names: the Dodgers stolid power-hitting Jewish catcher Jocko Klein, brothers Spike and Bob Russell, a.k.a. the Keystone Kids (Spike the shortstop and eventual young manager, a la Lou Boudreau, Bob the second basemen), lean immature rookie pitcher Bones Hathaway, etc. Tunis also wrote two dynamite novels in the mid-1940s about an idealistic Indiana high school basketball coach, "Yea Wildcats!" and "A City for Lincoln." Among other things, the second book deals directly with the still vigorous presence in the town of Springfield (read Muncie) of the Ku Klux Klan.

Charles Einstein (b. 1926 -- about 25 years before brother Albert Brooks) is apparently still with us. "The Only Game in Town" was a Dell paperback original, published in 1955; cheap copies can be found through various used book search services, e.g. Bookfinder. Einstein also edited an excellent large-format anthology of baseball pieces in the 1950s. Google him and you'll find the title, which escapes me right now.

There are some nice photos in "That Old Ball Game," but my favorite baseball books are John R. Tunis' novels for boys -- "The Kid from Tomkinsville," "Keystone Kids," "Rookie of the Year," "The Kid Comes Back," "Highpockets," etc. -- about a fictional group of Brooklyn Dodgers. They're very grown up emotionally, and Tunis, a former sportswriter who knew what he was talking about, was a subtle, economical writer. Another very good, grown up baseball novel (it even includes sex; Tunis doesn't) is the previously mentioned Charles Einstein's "The Only Game In Town," which may be hard to find (I had it as mass market '60s paperback). Einstein, BTW, is (or was; he may be deceased) the considerably older brother of comedians Albert Brooks and Bob Einstein ("Officer Judy" on the Smothers Brothers Show and "Super Dave Osborne" on his own). Yes, that means that Brooks' given name is Albert Einstein. "There was a lot of shtick in our house," Brooks has explained. (Their father was a dialect comedian who appeared on the old Eddie Cantor radio show, pretending to be Greek, under the name Parkyakarkas.) Another fine baseball book is the late Leonard Koppett's "The Thinking Man's Guide to Baseball," in which he explains in convincing detail, and I believe for the first time, citing such unimpeachable authorities as Yogi Berra, that the chief attribute every effective major league hitter must have is the ability to control the fear of being hit by a pitched ball (Berra, obviously not a brooder, said that the fear never goes away, always must be mastered). Koppett's point, as I recall, is that the particular sort of passive-active courage/judgment (or whatever you want to call it) that's required to stand in there effectively against the likes of Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens, and Pedro Martinez is subtly different from a lot of other athletic tasks that also call for plenty of courage/guts/good judgment under fire, plus a fair amount of physical ability.

A recommendation with a footnote: The Collectables CD that includes two Wilson Trio albums recorded for Columbia in 1959 ("Mr. Wilson and Mr. Gershwin") and 1960 ("And Then They Wrote..."). The latter is a particular delight, a series of salutes to other pianist-composers that includes a walking version of "'Round Midnight" that's to die for (wonder if Monk ever heard it), a marvelous reshaping of "Artistry in Rhythm," and an intense take on Brubeck's "The Duke." Sound is OK, but when I compare the CD to an LP copy I have of "And Then They Wrote..." I'm disappointed. The LP was one of the great 30th St. Studio recordings, tremendous airy presence on all three instruments, while the CD collapses the sonic space a bit and loses some of that magical presence on the piano. If I'd only heard the CD, I might not feel that anything was awry, but there you are. On the other hand, the music is great, and unless you can find copies of the LPs, this looks like the only way to go now. Don't think it's likely that this material will be remastered in our lifetimes.

There is a recent Granz bio, "Norman Granz: The White Moses of Black Jazz," by Chicagoan Dempsey Travis. Haven't read it, but based on what I've seen of Travis' previous work, I wouldn't say it would be great -- probably more of an anecdotal cut-and-paste job.

Played golf with Nordine once, about 10 years ago. (We both showed up at a local public course as singles at the same time and teed off together.) He was pleased to be recognized -- you couldn't mistake that voice -- but was grumpy about the state of his game, the kind of golfer who can't believe that his lost shot went awry when in fact it would have been miraculous if he ever hit one that didn't. (I'm no good either but not indignant/surprised about it.) Speaking of "Colors," Dutch jazz pianist/composer Michiel Braam had made an album of that title (with bassist Wilbert De Joode and drummer Michael Vatcher) that's based on Nordine's poems. Heard the group live in Chicago about a month ago and was impressed. Braam, like a lot of post-M. Mengelberg Dutch modernists is a witty eccentric with a personal twist -- he loves to play with rhythmic wrong-footedness and has his own way brittle of doing it, has formidable chops, and reads Monk back towards Waller, as seen through a broken kaleidoscope. For further info go to www.michielbraam.com He's written about in Kevin Whitehead's book "New Dutch Swing."

Just listened to the Spaulding "Brilliant Corners." It's pleasant, sincere, but a little lightweight -- interesting, perhaps, that S. resorts to some bluesy cliches in the regular tempo portion of his solo but becomes more inventive in double time. Spaulding aside, when placed next to the original recording, the greatest difference (provided Monk himself is left aside too) is in the bass and drum teams: Pettiford and Roach think and play with a compositional intensity; sounds like Ron Carter and Kenny Washington (esp. KW) sense that something special is called for but didn't have enough rehearsal time to work it all out. And even then... BTW, on the original "Brilliant Corners" (the title track and the other two he's on) Pettiford is fantastic IMO -- not unlike Wilbur Ware in his sense of what fits with Monk; though OP's sound and articulation are different. During Rollins' solo on "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are" the interaction among Rollins, Monk, Pettiford, and Max is something else, kind of mythic I thought while listening just now, after an image popped into my head of four of those giant Easter Island stone figurines, grouped together and engaged in conversation. (No, I wasn't smoking an Easter Island cigarette.)

I agree about the lack of strong soloists (Rolf Ericson and Levitt himself probably were the best) but to my mind that kept the emphasis where it should be -- on the rich, storytelling writing. If I try in my mind to replace Ericson, Renn, Gene Allen, or Sy Johnson with more distinctive personalities of the time who were also ace readers -- say Art Farmer, Phil Woods, Pepper Adams, and Bill Evans -- I think Levitt would have had a much-less distinctive band that might not have worked out at all. Also, because all members of the Levitt band, as I recall, were members of the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra, they had lots of free time to rehearse -- guys like the players I mentioned (and any comparable figures I can think of) either were in the studios all the time, hopping from session to session, or had their own bands and careers to focus on.

Levitt, IMO, had a whole lot going for him as a composer-arranger and a player. In particular, his grasp of what makes Ellington tick and his ability to put that understanding to personal use is remarkable. It's right upfront on "HMV" from the "Dynamic Sounds" album but can be heard throughout his work (and stands in revealing contrast to those W. Marsalis compositions that make hollow gestures in Ellington's direction). Also, as Chuck says, if you can find that "Arrangers" disc, it's worth almost any price for the Carisi tracks. A collected Levitt would make a fine Mosaic Select, but I'm afraid the market for it would be far below any threshold that Cuscuna could contemplate.

Jim -- Chuck's post explains the tension perfectly, though I think Daley also was drawn to "the new thing" on his own to some extent, but more along the lines of the label than because there was any deep link between what he liked and could do musically and what Ornette et al. were about. Among that generation of tenormen in Chicago, I thought Nicky Hill had a much better grasp of what was at stake there. And of course there's Von, who was ahead of or beyond almost everything, but he wasn't around town then, I believe, but in Vegas with the Treniers. I thought Russell Thorne was a genius. He had classical training, played with the Duluth Symphony, I think (imagine there being a Duluth Symphony if you've ever passed through Duluth), and he knew the modern classical compositional scene inside out, could improvise arco as fluidly as LaFaro or Peacock could pizzicato -- sounded like a swinging Webern string quartet. And it wasn't virtuoso bullshit; he was a structural thinker, everything he played made sense, a new sense. Who knows what he might have become if he'd stuck with it, but he was a very high-strung guy and decided to go another way. He now runs (maybe owns) an occult bookstore in Chicago. About his relationship to LaFaro and Peacock in a "who came first?" sense, I don't know for sure, but I'd bet it was as much a something in the air thing as direct influence. I sure hope that live Joe Daley Trio stuff comes out, because unless my memory is shot, Thorne on RCA was maybe one-half or one-third of what Thorne was at his best.

I'll try not to repeat any info from the Jazz Institute-lined pieces mentioned above. One question: Was Daley Irish-American (as his name suggests) or Italian-American? I always felt it was the latter because of his stylistic affinity with other, younger Italian-American Bird/Rollins players who later picked up on Coltrane -- Joe Farrell (Farrintello), Sal Nistico, et al. While I don't think Farrell was a Daley student, both were on the Chicago scene circa '57, and Farrell certainly sounds like he picked up on some of Daley's things. Daley himself, while obviously gifted, always struck me as a rather laborious player -- in the sense that he seemed to be thrusting his "labor," especially his harmonic learnedness, at you as though it were something that was supposed to have a whole lot of meaning in itself (in that vein, note in that 1979 interview his singling out Joe Henderson and Dave Liebman for praise). By contrast, on the Chicago scene of the mid- to late-50s, Johnny Griffin and Ira Sullivan seemed to be far more natural players -- not that there wasn't a lot of hard work in their music, but it wasn't presented that way. Even Griffin's mind-boggling displays of speed didn't come across as proof of labor -- they were about fun and dazzlement, magic, smoke, and flames. As for the Joe Daley Trio, I think it was a mostly mixed marriage or a mis-marriage. Daley seemed to come at outside playing from the outside, so to speak. Unlike the two Russells (especially Thorne at that time--Hal R.'s full-scale emergence lay some years ahead), he didn't feel its logical necessity; for him it was more like decor laid on top of bebop roots. There are tapes of the trio in live performance that may emerge some day (cleaning up the sound seems to be the main problem) that are much better than the RCA album (I was at a lot of the gigs those tapes are drawn from, though I haven't heard the tapes myself). But the trio got better IMO because Thorne and Hal Russell's ideas of how the music should go were winning out over Daley's (this was a turbulent bunch of guys in every way), and understandably Daley was not happy about this; he expressed satisfaction when Thorne left , and he preferred (or said that he preferred) Thorne's more straightahead (at least at that time) replacement Donald Garrett. As I recall, this second version of the Daley Trio was short-lived and was more or less in a Rollins at the Vanguard bag, which probably was where Daley had wanted things to be all along.

Sorry -- the phrase "... or maybe it was forbidding enough on the technical level to be taken..." should have been followed by something like "and used as a series of licks." Got distracted and forget to type that in.

Jim: There's a whole long piece or two about this in "ye olde forthcoming book," but I think a key element here is how the process of being influenced by others has altered in jazz over time -- partly because of how much material has accumulated over almost a century but also because of (and this might amount to almost the same thing) the nature of the musicians who were unavoidably influential. Briefly, Armstrong not only influenced everyone on every instrument, but with the exception of a few outright Armstrong impersonators, his influence was remarkably fruitful and benign in terms of fostering individuality. (Much the same is true of Coleman Hawkins.) Restricting yourself to the trumpet and the first generation or so of players who fed on Louis, you could easily get to several hundred (maybe many more) really fine and distinctive players. Could the same be said of Charlie Parker-influenced players, particularly if we restricted it to alto saxophonists? Lots of fine players of course, but the number of those who were as much their own man in relation to Bird as, say, Buck Clayton or Bill Coleman were in relation to Louis? Not so many, I think, for several reasons: Technically and in the emotional realm, the musical material to be mulled over by Parker-influenced players was, while at least as intense, a fair bit narrower (or maybe it was forbidding enough on the technical level to be taken ; it was a whole lot harder to absorb Bird and not sound a lot like him -- or more like him than the best Armstrong-influenced trumpeters sounded like Louis. (One of the things that those of who love Jackie McLean love about him is the unique way he "solved" the problem of how to get Parker and be wholly yourself. But imagine [though we don't have to imagine it], a player whose solution to the problem to how to be himself incorporates McLean's solution, as realized in Jackie's music, of how to be alert to Bird and still be himself. At some point the feedback, if that's the way to put it, can get peculiar--imagine [again we don't have to] a guy who's been influenced by Bird through McLean, through Gary Bartz, through a guy who's dug Gary Bartz -- and I'm assuming genuineness on the part of all parties in this chain, though I wonder about, say, some of today's youngish Cannonball devotees.) Anyway, by the time we get Coltrane it's like Parker but much more so--the techniques are forbidding but also extractable and codifiable, the emotional core is fierce but graspable only if one has a similar temperament (and who does?), yet the sounds associated with that emotional core are readily reproducable by almost anyone. (Of course, Ornette was following his own daemon, but his approach also can be seen as a way of stepping outside of this continuum to some extent -- by stepping sideways or "backwards" -- in order to step forward. As the Art Ensemble slogan went: "Ancient To the Future.") No blame anywhere along the line IMO -- seems like these things have had to be so. And the above is just an outline. There's lots more to be said.

Today, IMO, we're lucky if we get anything close to "B-teamness" in players who are below a certain age and are of what I'd call the neo-con persuasion. In fact, the genuineness that is part of "B-teamness" -- the fact or the hope of personal workmanlike variation -- seems to me alarmingly rare in that crowd, for a whole lot of reasons.

Sorry -- I meant to say "...you DO get the feeling of honest labor rather than ecstastic inspiration.

Junior Cook. And though I'm sure that some will feel otherwise, given the intense affection his playing can inspire, Cook's frontline partner, Blue Mitchell. To my mind, they both fit one of the possible B-team templates: Players of undeniable individuality and quality who nonethless drew more heavily on their models (a la Curtis Fuller and J.J.) than their models did on those who preceded them. Also, there's something about their playing, no matter how fine, that fits the term "workmanlike." That is, even at their best, you don't get the feeling of honest labor rather than ecstastic inspiration. Art Taylor, previously mentioned, is another perfect example of the type.

Patricia -- Based on the street furniture (light pole, police call box, etc.) behind Roberts and Smith on that album cover photo, I'd guess that Roberts was about 5'5'' and Smith about 6'2''. Maybe Roberts was huge a la DEEP.

Patricia -- Unless you're talking about Luckey Roberts' ability to stretch a fourteenth, he was by no means a "huge" man. See the cover to the marvelous album "Harlem Piano: Solos by Luckey Roberts and Willie 'The Lion' Smith" (OJC). Roberts is on the right, more than a head shorter than Smith. In fact, the one word that might describe Roberts is "squat."

Cool with me, too.

Jazzbo, I know this is getting old, but look again at Appel's use of "aleatory" below: Appel has a big problem with the term "aleatory." It first crops up this way: "...Parker wanted to study with Edgar Varese, the French-American composer of aleatory music..." Next comes this: "Teagarden's closing 'trombone' chorus on 'St. James Infirmary' is aleatory music, modernism by definition, though to him it was a proven crowd-pleasing vaudeville trick: using a water glass in place of the trombone's chamber and flared bell..." Then this: "The toilet plunger, as vernacular and democratic as an object gets, is the source of the most popular incarnation of avant-garde aleatory music. This is a major Elllington achievement...aleatory music, from Pierre Boulez down, has not found an audience. Ellington jungle style is Varese for the people by way of the plumber." And finally this: "...Ellington's aleatory wonder, 'Happy-Go-Lucky-Local,' where the brass bears the heaviest load in simulating the sounds of a train etc...." No way one term, however you define it, fits these five very different instances: the music of Varese, Teagarden and the water glass on "St. James Infirmary," Ellington's plunger-muted brassmen, the music of Boulez, and the train evocations of "Happy-Go-Lucky-Local." It's just careless writing and thinking, and I resent it when guys like Appel, who rightly would get keel-hauled if they wrote and thought this way within their academic disciplines, stroll into jazz as though it were a kind of intellectual summer resort where precision doesn't matter and almost anything goes. Look at the way guys like Jim Sangrey and Chuck Nessa take care over their words here. The results may not sound fancy (and Chuck can be very blunt), but you almost always know precisely what they mean, and you usually feel that what they're talking and thinking about is something that they've tried to understand and put into words as precisely as they could. To me, that's a basic moral test that we all should try to meet.

OK, Chris, but let us know how the book strikes you once you've had a chance to read it. Maybe it has more to do with me than Appel, but there was something about his pipe-and-smoking-jacket tone in this book that gave me the willies. I don't like being talked down to, though sometimes the realities of a particular situation make that unavoidable. But really I don't like being talked down to by someone who not only doesn't know his stuff but also is so damned cavalier about it all. That's how Appel struck me.

Well, I see a big contradiction or disconnect or just ass-backwardness in Appel's "My musical emphasis is on singing and the lyrics of songs, because words lend themselves to discourse more readily than musical notes." His MUSICAL emphasis is not on the music because music is difficult to talk about? How about if someone said, "My study of, say, Edith Piaf (or Kurt Weill) will focus on the musical notes because I don't really understand (or feel at ease talking about) the setting and/or interpretation of French (or German) words." As for, Do you think he mean aleatory to mean "taking risks"? maybe he did sort of. But that's not what "aleatory" means, and "taking risks" doesn't really fit how he uses "aleatory" in the passages quoted. I think Appel thinks that "aleatory" basically means grabbing something rather unconventional that happens to be at hand and putting it to use, but that fits well only one of the quoted passages (the Teagarden water glass anecdote). Besides "aleatory music" is, or once was, a commonly used phrase -- a music that involves chance operations on the part of the composer and/or performer, a la John Cage -- and none of Appel's quotes refers to music of that sort. I wouldn't harp on this if Appel weren't an English professor and a rather self-important one at that, a guy who prides himself on using words more precisely than the great unwashed do. On the other hand, he did do a fine job on his annotated edition of Nabokov's "Lolita," a task that was better suited to his abilities and temperament.

Here's a copy of an email about "Jazz Modernism" that I sent to a friend a while back: About that peculiar Appel book, it's about what I thought it would be but more inept, feels improvised but not in a good sense. Lots of detailed but often cute and cozy references to works by Picasso and Matisse (the book is full of nice slick-paper reproductions), and then Appel tries to link this to Armstrong, Ellington and Fats Waller et al., "to establish the place of classic jazz (1920-50) ... in the great modernist tradition in the arts." [Why pull the curtain in 1950, I wonder?] Appel: "My musical emphasis is on singing and the lyrics of songs, because words lend themselves to discourse more readily than musical notes," he says at one point, rather ominously. But then there's this a while later on: "Even Miles Davis, a racially proud man, recorded instrumental selections from 'Porgy and Bess' in 1958 (arranged by Gil Evans, a white man), notwithstanding its controversial book and (coon show?) libretto. Simply enough, the words didn't matter." [Did I miss something here?] Appel: "Accessible art [e.g. jazz] should be disseminated as widely as possible because it is tonic, like plasma or Andre Derain's great...masterpiece etc.... The idea of tonic art is old-fashioned and naive to many, but if art...isn't uplifting, and nationalism, religion, and Marxism have failed, what then?" [What then, indeed. Please pass the plasma.] Appel: "'Make it new,' as Ezra Pound urged American poets in 1914. 'Taint what you do, it's the way that you do it,' sang Trummy Young with Jimmy Lunceford's Band in 1939." [And "Caldeonia, what makes your big head so hard?" asked Woody Herman in 1946.] When he does touch upon those musical notes, Appel has a big problem with the term "aleatory." It first crops up this way: "...Parker wanted to study with Edgar Varese, the French-American composer of aleatory music..." Next comes this: "Teagarden's closing 'trombone' chorus on 'St. James Infirmary' is aleatory music, modernism by definition, though to him it was a proven crowd-pleasing vaudeville trick: using a water glass in place of the trombone's chamber and flared bell..." Then this: "The toilet plunger, as vernacular and democratic as an object gets, is the source of the most popular incarnation of avant-garde aleatory music. This is a major Elllington achievement...aleatory music, from Pierre Boulez down, has not found an audience. Ellington jungle style is Varese for the people by way of the plumber." And finally this: "...Ellington's aleatory wonder, 'Happy-Go-Lucky-Local,' where the brass bears the heaviest load in simulating the sounds of a train etc...." Apparently Appel thinks that the "aleatory" means at least three or maybe four different things, none of which happens to be what aleatory does mean ("involving random choice by the artist"). "Using sounds from the natural or non-musical world in a piece of music" would fit Varese; "making sounds on musical instruments that evoke the natural or non-musical world" would fit "Happy-Go-Lucky-Local"; "making music on something that isn't normally a musical instrument" would be Teagarden and the water glass; and maybe "atonal or serial" would fit "aleatory music, from Pierre Boulez down"--certainly none of Appel's prior uses of aleatory fits here. Appel: "...Lester actually roomed with Billie and her mother for a time, though he and Billie were never lovers--a striking, exceptional fact given the free and easy jazz milieu." [What?!!!] There is one good story, if true: Appel was at Birdland on a Saturday in the winter of 1951 to hear Charlie Parker when a group that included Stravinsky sat down at the table next to Appel's, whereupon Bird, alerted to Stravinsky's presence by Red Rodney, began the first set with "KoKo" and "at the beginning of his second chorus interpolated the opening of 'Firebird Suite'--at which Stravinsky "roared with delight, pounding his glass on the table, the upward arc of the glass sending its liquor and ice cubes onto the people behind him...." Hey, he says he was there. End of book report.

Probably shouldn't mention it here, but on the other hand maybe I should. My book -- to be published in fall 2004 by Yale U. Press -- includes a longish piece I wrote about Evans for the Chicago Tribune back in 1983 that takes a basically negative stance toward his post-Vanguard work. Added to this is a new long epilogue that looks at the large number of Evans recordings issued since then ("Turn Out the Stars," etc.) and reaches a similar conclusion. I'll mention the title of the book, but unfortunately I can only do that phonetically right now because the two keys at the far left of the bottom line of my keyboard quit working the other day (the ones to the left of "c"). Phonetically, then, it's "Jass In Search of Itself." (OK, restrain yourselves.) BTW, does anyone have a remedy for the keys-that-quit problem. Don't recall spilling any gunk there, but if I did, is there a safe, simple remedy? Or do I need a new keyboard?

"How To Succeed" may be a shade less personal than some other McFarland projects, but the writing is full of inventive touches and the playing, by the band and featured soloists, is top-drawer for that era in NY. Two others with some of the same players that have always struck me as being well above the "merely professional" norm of that era are Oliver Nelson's "Afro-American Sketches" and Bill Potts' "Porgy and Bess."