Larry Kart

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

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.