Larry Kart

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."

Wish I had a photo to contribute -- don't have a digital camera -- but just wanted to say, along with others, that this thread is immensely enjoyable. Everyone looks like someone it would be very good to know, which is remarkable, right? This portion of the world is a more than OK place.

The "girl" part of "Fat Girl" came about because Navarro had a rather high-pitched voice.

I'm a bit surprised at how many of these posts on "Minor Move" have been about how it ranks compared to other Brooks recordings. What are we here, a bunch of stamp or coin collectors? Isn't the thing that's most worth talking about here the kind of music that Tina Brooks actually made and how it worked, to the degree that those things can be talked about. I had my say in the liner notes -- how about somebody else (a la Sidewinders' on-target IMO remarks about Doug Watkins)?

Talk about your three-cushion billiard shots, Jack Jenney's onetime wife, singer and vocal coach Kay Thompson, later went on to write the very popular "Eloise" books, about the hoydenish little girl who lived at the Plaza Hotel. In case you want to see Thompson in action (apparently she was quite a load) she gives a memorable performance in the movie "Funny Face," with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, playing a fashion magazine editor named Maggie Prescott.

Here's one by English poet/jazz pianist Roy Fisher: THE THING ABOUT JOE SULLIVAN The pianist Joe Sullivan jamming sound against idea hard as it can go florid and dangerous slams at the beat, or hovers, drumming, along its spikes, in his time almost the only one of them to ignore the chance of easing down, walking it leisurely, he'll strut, with gambling shapes, underpinning by James P., amble, and then stride over gulfs of his own leaving, perilously toppling octaves down to where the chords grow fat again and ride hard-edged, most lucidly voiced, and in good inversions even when the piano seems at risk of being hammered the next second into scrap. For all that, he won't swing like all the others; disregards mere continuity, the snakecharming business, the 'masturbator's rhythm' under the long variations: Sullivan can gut a sequence in one chorus-- --approach, development, climax, discard-- and sound magnanimous. The mannerism of intensity often with him seems true, too much to be said, the mood pressing in right at the start, then running among stock forms that could play themselves and moving there with such quickness of intellect that shapes flaw and fuse, altering without much sign, concentration so wrapped up in thoroughness it can sound bluff, bustling just big-handed stuff-- belied by what drives him in to make rigid, display, shout and abscond, rather than just let it come, let it go-- And that thing is his mood: a feeling violent and ordinary that runs in among standard forms so wrapped up in clarity that fingers following his through figures that sound obvious find corners everywhere, marks of invention, wakefulness; the rapid and perverse tracks that ordinary feelings make when they get driven hard enough against time.

Relevant passage from the Mosaic set notes: The process whereby Tristano speeded up the tapes of his piano playing on "Line Up" and "East Thirty-Second" to match the prerecorded (and also fiddled with) bass and drum work of Peter Ind and Jeff Morton inspired a fair amount of controversy at the time, and while it died away when "C Minor Complex" made clear again what ought to have been obvious from the first--that Tristano could execute at the speed of "Line Up" and "East Thirty-Second" without electronic assistance--perhaps his justification for what he did ("the result sounded good to me") ought be taken literally. That is, by recording bass-register piano lines and speeding up the tapes until the pitch of the piano lines is raised one octave, Tristano not only made the lines move faster, but he also made a new sound. The lower in register a note on the piano is, the more slowly it "speaks" and the less rapidly it decays. By forcing that effect upwards, Tristano alters the attack-decay relationship of each note--adding a tremendously propulsive, Chu Berry-like buzz or whoosh to tones that couldn’t possibly have that effect, that sound, if they actually had been played in the piano’s middle register. P.S. Other disagree with this point ("'C Minor Complex' made clear again what ought to have been obvious from the first--that Tristano could execute at the speed of "Line Up" and "East Thirty-Second" without electronic assistance") but I think on too literal grounds; yes, "Line Up" is faster than "C Minor Complex" and the latter is all (or almost all) single-line (don't recall for sure at the moment), while "Line Up" is both single-line and chordal, but the initial objections to what Tristano did on "Line Up" (pianist John Mehegan wrote in a Down Beat article that Tristano had "cheated") were that he couldn't play that way at all in real time, and to my mind "C Minor Complex" makes it clear that he could. Also, it seems likely to me that that the tempo and single-line texture of "C Minor Complex" was mostly a matter of the way Tristano felt it that day.

You're right on both counts, Jim. The Mosaic notes were posted on a Lee Konitz discography website, but the last time I looked, that site doesn't exist anymore. The notes are going to be part of my book, though (due fall 2004, if all goes according to plan). Thanks for the compliment on the notes BTW -- five years down the road from writing them, I still think they're pretty interesting; at the least they make some points about Tristano, Konitz, and Marsh that I don't recall reading elsewhere.

I have an Aebersold Music Minus One-type record with Jimmy Raney -- as I recall the deal is that you can play duets with Raney, who can be made to sound like he's on one channel -- and it's some of the best Raney around.

Jazz -- A good place to start would be David Thomson's "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film." Thomson's a stimulating, opinionated guy, and there are entries for just about everyone under the sun. I probably look up something in it several times a week, maybe even more than that. Cinematography as a subject in itself, I don't know -- most of the books I think would be how-to tomes for would-be cinematographers. There is a nice old Dover paperback by Leonard Maltin, "The Art of the Cinematographer," which may still be available. It's a critical-historical survey of the craft, followed by interviews with five celebrated veterans. But cinematographers, while highly skilled, creative guys at the top level of the profession, are still basically executing the wishes of whoever on a particular movie (almost always the director) is finally in charge. Gregg Toland, for instance, is famous for his work on Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane," and Welles certainly fed on Toland's ideas and expertise. But Welles went on to make a lot of other distinctive, fascinating movies, none of them with Toland behind the camera, while Toland, when realizing the notions of other directors, was not part of a great movie again.

Jazz--I'm probably not a movie expert by movie-expert standards, whatever they are, but I have seen a lot of them, like to think about what I've seen, and have read a fair amount about movies here and there.

I'm not sure it's a matter of movies talking down to us but of a good and bad matches between a filmmaker's skills (or lack of skills) and the sort of story that's being told. Or maybe, which may amount ot the same thing, it's a matter of movies that talk in movie terms. For instance, Hitchcock's "Notorious," where as French director Jacques Rivette said everything resolves in the final three minutes -- "the love story, the family story, and the espionage story in a few magnificent, unforgettable shots" and in a way that would be difficult if not impossible to realize in any other story-telling medium. Likewise, a month or so ago, I tuned in the beginning of Howard Hawks' "To Have and Have Not" on TV and thought I'd watch a bit of a movie I'd seen a lot and then turn away to read the paper during a less than gripping and/or essential moment, only to find that there no such moments in the whole amazing thing. Again, this was a movie I'd seen many times. BTW, Bertrand Tavernier, who made "'Round Midnight," is a terrific director. What may have happened there is that Tavernier, a big jazz fan, got a little goggle-eyed about the project, and especially the fact of Dexter's presence in it, and thus wasn't as hard-headed and objective about shaping things as he needed to be.

One big flaw in the movie (among many virtues) IMO is that it's vital to the plot, as I recall, that Dexter's character, Dale Turner, be in less than vigorous shape physically and, above all, musically at one point, then get himself together and play with considerable strength before his final decline and death. But Dexter, at the point in his life when the movie was made, could only play one way, even if he had wanted to first sound a bit weak, then much stronger -- and that one way, however good it might be to hear, was definitely not on the strong side. Thus, what we heard from Dale Turner in the movie didn't match what the movie, and the people in it, said we were hearing from him. Also, while I'm sure that everyone here can tell the difference between the Dexter of the soundtrack and, say, the Dexter of "Go," I don't think that would be true of a whole lot of viewers any movie, including this one -- thus it might have been a "mistake" in movie terms to build the movie around a dramatic shift in behavior that most of the audience couldn't grasp unless it were spelled out (or cued in) for them in some extra-musical manner, like those films in which we know that Chopin's music is sensitive and fraught because he's coughing up blood all over the keyboard.

About Michael's point that the recorded sound of LaFaro might not be what one heard in a live setting from him, while I never heard LaFaro live, when I heard in a club setting (Shelly's Manne Hole) back in 1962 or '63 a bassist (Red Mitchell) whom I'd assumed from recordings had an unusually big sound, I was astonished to find that in a normal rhythm section with horns setup he was almost inaudible--and by that time in my life I'd heard lots and lots of bassists in live settings. FWIW, I've always assumed that Mitchell was LaFaro's chief stylistic model -- or at least that's the way it seemed to some of us at the time -- though LaFaro certainly was his own man.

Don't believe that there are many (if any) literal, fully worked out fugues on Duane Tatro's marvelous "Jazz For Moderns" (OJC) but Tatro's writing is full of fugal textures, handled with a organic inventiveness and air of necessity that is rare in jazz writing IMO. By contrast, check out the contemporary work of Tatro's fellow West Coast-based composer Jack Montrose, which is not without interest but where the fugal textures too often seem like bids for classiness and/or extra credit.

About the "rock star lottery," I thought of that Thursday night when I caught a bit of Harry Connick Jr.'s Christmas special and heard guys like Jimmy Greene playing with and beside the jaw droppingly out-of-tune singing of Connick Jr. At least Connick Jr. introduced the soloists by name, including a trumpeter named LeRoi (or LeRoy) Jones. Does A. I. Baraka know about this?

I knew that Ries was part of that Southern Michigan/Northern Ohio scene but didn't know that he and Margitza are friends or that they were on Maynard's band together. I've got a fair number of Ries' albums and particularly recommend, if you can find it, what may be his very first one: "Imaginary Time" (Moo) -- Moo is a Japanese label--with Randy Brecker, Scott Wendholt, Scott Colley, Joey Baron, Billy Hart, Franck Amsallem et al. I'm not saying that Tim hasn't grown as a player, but this sounds like it was just one of those great sets of days in the studio where everything clicked. If you have the album or can get it, check out Amsellem's solo on "Jasia."

Interesting how echoes of Mecca, Joe Cinderella (both Gil Melle guitarists) and Billy Bauer are cropping up in the work of several younger players, e.g. Liberty Ellman and Jeff Parker. I know that Parker is a Bauer fan, but it's also quite possible these days for people to "invent" stuff that was in fact invented 50 years ago, without the younger players ever having heard the stuff they seem to have been influenced by.

I only have "Heart of Hearts" of the ones he's made under his own name, and think I chose it over "Memento" after listening to both. Miller and and Blade are the bigger names, bit it seemed to me that Calderazzo and Ian Froman were a bit more tuned in to what what makes Margitza different from a lot of other players in the same general post-Trane/Wayne bag. I agree about the sincerity -- its presence or absence so difficult to quantify but definitely there in Margitza. Also, without being flashy, he's one hell of a fine saxophonist in purely instrumental terms -- a la Getz, perhaps, it sounds like he's making the whole the horn ring, could probably fill a large room without a mike, and yet is capable of very subtle shadings of volume and timbre. And his intonation is spot on. Another player who strikes me the way Margitza does is Tim Ries, though Margitza is a bit more openly or overtly "spiritual."

Speaking of Shafi Hadi/Curtis Porter, any ideas about where his highly distinctive style came from, especially those almost literally speech-like patterns of accentuation? The only biographical information on him I know is in Robert Levin's liner notes for "Hank Mobley" (Blue Note 1568), where Hadi/Porter mentions Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray and Benny Golson as inspirations and says that his current favorite tenorman is Charlie Rouse. It's not impossible that what makes Hadi/Porter so distinctive is all his own invention, but my guess is that Hadi/Porter, who spent some time in Detroit, also might have been listening closely to Yusef Lateef.

Another facet of Spahn's career. According to veteran Chicago sportswriter Terry Boers (formerly of the Sun-Times, now co-host of a sports-talk radio show on WSCR), Spahn had one of largest schlongs in the history of professional sports. Perhaps that helped him to keep his balance during that high-leg-kick windup--either that or it's why he needed to use that windup inm the first place: to get some clearance.

"Stella By Starlight" -- always disliked that tune, sounds like the musical equivalent of a cheesy chrome-played bathroom faucet.