Larry Kart

"Prez and Teddy" and "Jazz Giants '56" had a big impact on me, partly because I'd seen Young with JATP at the Chicago Opera House in 10/55 -- the concert was recorded and issued as "Blues in Chicago" -- and was bewildered, even disturbed, as a 13-year-old near-total novice who had heard no Young at all before this by the strange watery sounds that this seemingly enfeebled (in fact, on the verge of a nervous and physical breakdown) man was placing next to the muscular fervor of Jacquet, Flip Phillips, Eldridge, and Gillespie. Of course, Young recovered and made these wonderful albums in early '56. Hearing them, especially "Jazz Giants," was a lesson-and-a-half, though I still don't have the words to say what was taught.

Woke up in the middle of the night with the thought that it might be Jimmy Jones, not Oscar Peterson, on "Ben Webster And Associates." Whatever, it's a clotted, crippled rhythm section IMO, and their work infects the horn players. (Usually I like Jimmy Jones BTW; his quirky solos are the main point of interest on that H. Edison Verve two-fer referred to above.)

I have (or have had) all the Felsteds, and IMO only "The High and Mighty Hawk" is top drawer. Usually there are a couple of things awry in each case (one or more guys who weren't up to snuff that day and/or hadn't been in a while [e.g. Buster Bailey, Wells on "Bones for the King"]). Perhaps Dance was too much of a worshipful and/or hands-off producer -- compare for instance the Felsted Budd Johnson to the Swingville one, or the Buddy Tate to any of the Swingville dates on which he appears. Also, I'm puzzled by the raves for "Ben Webster And Associates." The lineup looks great on paper, but as I recall, the rhythm section, and thus virtually the entire date, is sabotaged by the mechanical (even by his own grim standards) comping of Oscar Peterson. I would love to get my hands on "Jazz Studio One." Haven't heard it in years, but I remember in particular some choice Bennie Green.

"Back To Back" with Ellington, Hodges, a noble and virtually cliche-free H. Edison, Les Spann, Al Hall, Jo, Jones. Died and gone to Heaven music. About T. Flanagan on those Swingville dates, not being a big Flanagan fan (too bland by and large on most modern dates IMO), I think he's often just what's called for on Swingville, as he moves back in the direction of Teddy Wilson and puts some spine in his style. Certainly the relatively modern backing Russell gets on "Swingin' with Pee Wee" has a lot to do with the success of that date. On the other hand, I can certainly see that Sir Charles Thompson would have/should have been a first choice.

Another Swingville gem now on OJC -- Coleman Hawkins' "Hawk Eyes" with Charlie Shavers, Ray Bryant, Tiny Grimes, et al. The fours between Hawkins and Shavers on the title track are one of the great moments in jazz. Another from the same source in a similar vein -- Hal Singer's "Blue Stompin'" with Shavers.

"Swingin' With Pee Wee," with Buck Clayton (in great form), Tommy Flanagan, Wendell Marshall, Osie Johnson and sublime Russell. Originally on Swingville, it's now on OJC, with another Russell date added. Just listened to it this weekend, and it's as hot and fresh as ever.

"Larry, from your final description, it may be fair to dub Griff the Robert Rauschenberg of the tenor saxophone." Joe, I can see it now, the famous Rauschenberg construction with the stuffed goat's head attached to the canvas, except in Griffin's case it would the head of a donkey singing "The Donkey Serenade." I once heard JG play a very convincing solo on "Happy Birthday" and some 15 years before had heard Roscoe Mitchell and Kalaparush Maurice McIntyre do the same thing. Maybe it's a South Side Chicago sensibility at work.

Johnny Griffin - Way Out! (click here to buy) The AOW for Nov. 30-Dec.6 is Johnny Griffin’s "Way Out!" recorded 2/58 for Riverside with Kenny Drew, Wilbur Ware, and Philly Joe Jones and available on OJC. I bought the Riverside when it first came out and apparently memorized almost every note (and with Griffin that’s a lot of notes) because listening now I find myself anticipating most every phrase, though that doesn’t diminish their impact one bit . (I replaced the old Riverside with a great sounding Japanese LP reissue of it in the early or mid-‘70s, so I can’t speak to the quailty of the OJC transfer--hope it’s good because "Way Out!" was a pretty decent sounding date by Riverside standards, a but dry and tight on PJJ’s cymbal s, but clear and in balance.) Some quotes that may help to set things set up: "[Chicago has at its core] an open and raw beauty that seems either to kill or endow one with the spirit of life." -- novelist Richard Wright "Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be at all." -- The first line of Andre Breton’s surrealist novel "Nadja" Griffin on himself: "We were always striving to get a big tone. We’d practice in the park, figuring if you could be heard there, you could be heard anywhere. The competitiveness, that was because of all the jam sessions. The club owners would come, and the guys they thought were the best were the ones who would get the gigs. Now I’ve learned how to relax, how to pace myself and use space a little better. But for a long time trying to prove that I could play as well as my contemporaries was always uppermost in my mind. Sonny Stitt really made me study my horn. He used to come to sessions and drive everybody crazy. When I was in the service and had plenty of time to practice, I would stand in the corner and play, thinking about Stitt. I’d imagine I was back in the States, working in a club, and he would would walk in, and I’d invite him up on the stand and hold my own. It worked out like that, too…. "I don’t think my playing has changed much over the years, but I do feel a little more relaxed. But then I never was that relaxed in the first place. Music always excited me so much that it was all I could do to keep from exploding." This is a perfectly programmed album, I think, unlike some other Riversides (e.g. Clark Terry’s "In Orbit" with Monk, as I believe Chuck Nessa once pointed out ). The flow of tunes and tempos is great, with that blindingly fast "Cherokee" as the nodal point (and now even that track doesn’t seem frantic to me), and the tunes themselves (particularly the two somewhat Dameronish lines by John Hines [a pianist I believe] , the gospel -tinged "Sunny Monday" and "Little John," and singer Teri Thornton’s hip blues, "Teri’s Tune) are almost hook-like and set the tone for everyone’s solos. There are four Ware solos here, some of the best ("Teri’s Tune" is a strong candidate for THE best) he ever recorded. If you don’t know this master of oblique primal simplicities, "Way Out!" is essential. That the earth gave birth to both Ware and Monk! I love this rhythm section (some put down the funkier side of K. Drew, but I think they’re wrong; it’s not added on but a logical outgrowth of his boogie-woogie roots). On every track the rhythm section makes all sorts of spontaneous "orchestral" adjustments (like S. Clark, P. Chambers and PJJ do on the title track of "Cool Struttin,’" where every chorus has slightly different "strut" to it, but here the shifts are more mercurial, because Griffin himself is). I don’t know if anyone ever asked PJJ, but the recorded evidence suggests that his musical kinship with Griffin was the tightest he had with any horn player. During their fours on "Sunny Monday" and "Little John" the way they imitate and feed on each other is something else. And on "Cherokee" there’s a passage toward the middle of Griffin’s final chorus where he and PJJ reach such an eerie peak of drum/horn fusion/ecstasy that hey have to take it down a notch-- as though the whole damn performance, which already is teetering on the edge, were about to come loose, like a seaside boardwalk in a hurricane. I admire the mostly tasty Griffin of his Galaxy-era albums, but it’s the lurid Griffin-- full of tonal distortions and outrageous, and outrageously jammed-in, quotes --that I love most (though his quote here on "Cherokee" from "Fascinatin’ Rhythm" is very tasty). Once in a fanciful mood I wrote this about JG: "A Griffin solo is like a construction made of fused-together pieces of cultural-physical debris--a cracked juke box, a smoking truck tire, some buzzing neon tubong and maybe a 1953 Buick Skylark grille and bumper. The title? ‘Ugly Beauty.’"

Clunky -- I think I know what you mean about the music on "Bird Lives" having an unsettling effect. I'd say it was supposed to. Not only were highly individualistic masters or near-masters involved (Ira, Hill, Jodie Christian, Donald Garrett, Wilbur Campbell, Dorel Anderson), but this music was being made (March, 1962) in a post-"Coltrane at the Vanguard," post-advent of Ornette world i.e. all the musicians involved, boppish though they all may have been in their points of origin, to some extent had taken account of these happenings and were being affected by them--and affected perhaps in more personal, quirky ways on Chicago's scene they would have been if this had been NYC. Things feel looser, freer, and also at times more wild, even frantic (Ira is so full of ideas that it sounds like his mind is on roller skates), and there's a lot more toying with the given language than there would have been from the same players a couple years before this--although bassist Donald Garrett always was a player who would push things in an earthy "out" direction. Now that you mention it, I think that the unsettling affect here (and some of the moves these players made) is a definite forecast of the effect of the Miles-Shorter-Hancock-Carter-Williams Quintet, which was about two years down the road.

Lazaro -- As for the latter part of "Maybe Eddie Harris was an influence on the straight ahead guys around Chicago because of the frequency of his playing there, and his inside/almost outside approach (do you think any of that method came out of Pharaoh?). I'm pretty sure that Eddie H. was Eddie H. for a good stretch of time, maybe eight or more years, before he or or anyone else outside of Little Rock had heard of Pharoah -- besides I don't hear much resemblance anyway, certainly not to Pharoah with Coltrane. Also, I'm not sure who you're referring to by "the straight ahead guys around Chicago" that Harris might have influenced. I don't believe that Harris had much influence on local players of his generation or even the one that came after (as I recall, they were into the guys that everyone else around the country was at the time, with the AACM players being the exception in that regard when they came along). If I'm right about Steve Coleman (b. 1956) being the first somehat notable Chicago-based guy to have picked up on Harris (though it may be that for Coleman it was more Bunky Green, though it kind of comes down to the same thing), that would be a gap of 22 years (Harris b. 1934), i.e. three jazz generations at the least. As for '"So you're saying Harris trick bag, however hip, may have limited him from attaining the fullness of the freedom principle?," I don't think of the "freedom principle" quite that concretely -- it's just that Harris seemed to me to be one of those players who liked to build his own special world (musically and commercially) and more or less seal it off as much as possible. The semi-forgetten might have been master from the Chicago scene of that time IMO was tenorman Nicky Hill (d. circa '65 I think, of the usual causes). Out of Mobley, Wardell, Stitt, and maybe Harold Land in spirit, if not in terms of actual influence, he had a way moving ahead on primarily melodic principles taht allowed him to respond to Ornette in a way that almost no one of a similar background and generation in any city did.

Jim -- A couple of Joe Farrell stories (I used to like the way the played when he was still in Chicago, less so after he got to NYC, but the thing he came up with that arguably was so influential was, I believe, something that he'd pretty much learned (or extrapolated) from Chicago tenor guru Joe Daley. First story (a secondhand one but from a reliable source, a friend of the drummer who was involved): When Farrell was a student at the U. of Illinois in the late '50s, maybe '57-'58 (a flute major), the MJQ played a concert there, after which there was a session at someone's house that involved just Farrell, Percy Heath, the drummer and an audience of three young women (probably Farrell and the drummer's girlfriends, plus someone Heath had met after the concert). In any case, for reasons that I don't entirely recall (controlled substances might have been involved), it seemed a good idea to all that the music continue but with all parties (including the audience) disrobed, and that things went on that way at a very high musical level for some time, I think devolving into non-musical activity later on. In any case, the picture of a tall, wiry nude Percy Heath and the nude, chunky, sort of John Belushi-like Farrell is not an easy one to get out of my mind. Second story: At some point in the mid-'80s, probably within a year of his death in '86, Farrell came back to town to play at the Jazz Showcase with the house rhythm section, which included Wilbur Campbell. (Wilbur had been the drummer of choice when Farrell was [or was trying to be] one of the young lions at late-'50s Chicago sessions.) It seemed to me that Farrell was in very good form -- that in particular, though this is in retrospect, some of his steely "method" was yielding to openness because he was feeling the effects of the AIDS-related stuff that would kill him, and he knew that he didn't have a lot of time left. In any case, in the middle of a tune in the first set, Farrell stopped for a few bars in the midst of really good solo and said loud enough for the crowd to hear but as much or more to himself: "Damn--I finally learned how to play with Wilbur!" Lazaro -- I'm not sure what you mean by "because the straight ahead players in Chicago heard all of Eddie Harris?" But it's interesting that two of the guys from that scene who reportedly have had a great belated influence on a lot of players in the Osby-Steve Coleman orbit (Harris and alto man Bunky Green) were not as I recall regarded as being at the top level of the musical food chain by their Chicago colleagues/peers -- Harris mostly because he had his "method," which was cool but still a method, no matter how hip; Green partly for that reason too but mostly because he was kind of a lightweight, flightly player no matter what, one of those guys who might get into something but then would almost always take things in a direction that seemed a bit or a lot too mechanical and cute, i.e. not as serious as his own best ideas had implied things might go. Also, it was hard not to compare Green with the somewhat similar-sounding Frank Strozier, whose stay in Chicago preceded and partially overlapped Green's presence on the scene and who seemed the more substantial player -- and even Strozier wasn't at the level of Ira Sullivan on those occasions when Ira chose to play alto.

This is a tough one because I don't really know the NYC scene from the inside out, though I know and have known some people who are or were part of it and have a sense from knowing them of how much of their selves they've invested in the longstanding notion that NYC is the ultimate place of judgment and testing as far as jazz is concerned, which means (to get a bit circular, but that's the way I think it is) that there have to be generally agreed upon "tests" or "standards" by which the judging can be done. Also, in Chicago after a certain point I don't know that there were that many jazz gigs for the sort of "topnotch professionals" who could also do demanding (in some sense) studio work etc. of various kinds, thus one possibly key element of the kind of divided (if that's the way to put it) "Hey, but I'm a pro!" musical mindset that seems to characterize the NYC scene wasn't in place and maybe couldn't be. And in the time when there were such "pros" around Chicago--well, I can't think of one of them who also had the sort of credibility in the jazz community that, say, a fair number of the Vanguard Orchestra-associated guys have had over the years. One possible example of one of the things I'm groping toward would be the late Chicago drummer Wilbur Campbell, a great player. But as a great as Wilbur was, one aspect of the "professional" mindset didn't apply to him in my experience, and it may be have been inseparable from the gist of his greatness. The pro will never fall below the "professional" level; if the music isn't happening that night for reasons beyond his control, he will do what he can and then try to wall off the problem and keep ticking. Wilbur's humane openness, however, could leave him open to ... not failure but if things we're falling apart around him through no fault of his own, he couldn't wall that off and to some extent would get infected by it -- not infected a whole lot neccesarily, but if over time you charted Wilbur's best nights against his less than topnotch ones, there'd be a gap that was greater than there would be between, I don't know, Osie Johnson's or Ed Shaugnessy's or Joey Baron's high and lows. But the thing that Wilbur and Von Freeman (l recall a famous jazz critic telling me that he couldn't listen to Von, maybe even that he doubted he was competent, because he played sharp) and a host of other guys had or have going for them is, potentially at least, that openness -- or perhaps it's just their sense that the risk must be risked and in your own way, if you think it's worth it, that there are no self-protective secret handshakes. As the poet Frank O'Hara said: "You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.'" On the other hand, if there is that downside to the NYC scene -- to me, Chris Potter is the current standard model of what Jim S. was talking about -- think of all the guys over the years (George Duvivier is one of many who comes to mind) who were part of it and were walking breathing archives of deep experience, knowledge and personal skill, and who could play things that would make your heart stop.

To be specific, that's the last two bars of the bridge of "Sophisticated Lady."

Jim -- I know of and can sort of hear the Konitz-Henderson connection (and not only because Lee did a duo with him on that old Milestone LP), but for me Lee never met any sequence or situation that he couldn't turn into a real melody. The contrast is especially striking on that Steeplechase album that pairs Lee and the heavly JH-influenced Rich Perry, "RichLee." It's a terrific album because Lee is in A+ form, as is the very sympatico to him rhythm section (Harold Danko, Jay Anderson, Billy Drummond), but it's fascinating to hear Lee's unstoppable, in-the-moment melodic flow (his "Moonlight in Vermont" solo is especially fantastic) alongside Perry's non-stop "phweedling." You'd think Perry would have to hear the difference and try to do something about it, and actually I think he does at times--though it sounds like it's almost painful for him to just play the head of a standard tune, or a like-minded variation on it, without putting enough "phweedly" spin on it. On the other hand, the notes say that Lee is a great admirer of Perry's playing, so what do I know? Seems to me that a lot of this comes down to, or springs from, the craft-union aspect of the professional jazz musician's world (or a fair percentage of it), especially in NYC and environs. That is, unless you can do X,Y, and Z the way we all agree (at least at this time) that X,Y, and Z should be done, then you can't belong to the club. I recall from somewhere a remark by Phil Woods that epitomized this -- that no jazz musician who couldn't properly play that notoriously tricky (harmonically) part of "Sophisticated Lady" deserved to be called a real jazz musician. Of course, one should be able to do that, but that doesn't in itself necessarily mean that P. Woods (or anyone else who gets those changes right) is then going to play something interesting, there or anywhere else.

Lazaro--Yes, I listened to a bit of an Open Loose disc in a record store, and it gave me the same feeling, but I wouldn't say that I heard enough to feel certain of anything, just enough to know that I didn't want to buy it that day.

I listened again to the track ("Hannibul") from the Sticks and Stones album that appears on the anthology disc "Document Chicago: New Jazz and Improvisation" (482 Music) and feel that it is not a very good representation of what Matana Roberts and colleagues can do, mostly because it's one of thoose "linen closet" recordings. Probably best to wait for their Thrill Jockey disc. However, there is a lot of strong (and well-recorded) stuff on "Document Chicago." for further info go to www.482music.com (I have no connection with the label.)

Matana Robert's website is http://www.geocities.com/robertsmatana/ Sticks and Stones has an album out, which you can link up to from the website, but the track I heard from it on an anthology disc didn't quite match what I'd heard live from the band a night or two before, mostly because she's so much a "sound" player I believe, and the sound quality on the disc seemed rather tight and dry. (I'll be getting the album anyway.) Roberts said the band will be making a new album for the Chicago Indie label Thrill Jockey in a month or two. From what I know you like, and from what I've heard of your own playing, Jim, I think you'd like her.

Heard Matana Roberts several times in Chicago about five years ago in a jam session format, when she sounded quite a bit like Greg Osby. Heard her again in Chicago last month with Sticks and Stones (bassist Josh Abrams, drummer Chad Taylor), and she sounded great and like no one but herself. What I particularly liked, if this makes any sense, is that the shape of her sound perfectly matched the shape of her lines -- in both cases there was a distinctive, highly expressive "curve" at work, as there was in Benny Carter's playing, though of course she and Carter don't sound alike.

Mike-- I don't think that "afraid of the consequences" in your "Once you've reached total freedom of musical expression, everything you do has to sound conservative after that. That's what happened to Stravinskij after "Le Sacre du Printemps", he had broken all conventional boundaries of his time, and either was afraid of the consequences himself or didn't see any further development in that direction" is a fair or accurate reading of the music that S. came up with in the '20s or of how and why he came up with it. "Didn't see any further development in that direction" is more likely, but even then I'd rather emphasize S's fierce "make it new" curiosity/inventiveness. I don't think that works like, say, the Octet, Symphonies of Wind Instruments, "Les Noces" or "Oedipus Rex" shows signs of being less urgently or less personally produced than ""Le Sacre" was. Less shocking to the public, yes, but that's not S's fault.

Lazaro -- I hear the same JH-related thing in Malaby as you do, but most of the time it nearly drives me crazy. One perhaps revealing example is the way he and the leader play on Dave Ballou's 2001 Steeplechase album "On This Day," where all the pieces were supposedly improvised from scratch. But the results essentially consist of everyone, especially Malaby, laying down such a carpet of harmonic ambiguity (apparently in this case in the name of potentially making everything "fit") that what you mostly get is all this dial-twisting, side-slipping, "after you Alfonse, after you Gaston" soup -- actually stating what I'd call an idea is almost impossible. I've heard all the horns involved, esp. Ballou and Billy Drewes, sound much "freer" when they were playing in a less "free" context. Another player heavily influenced by JH, for good or ill, is Rich Perry, who when he was a newcomer to the Thad-Mel band was known as "Little Joe." In Perry's case, what I hear fairly often is that the melodic element of his playing, such as it is, has almost nothing to to do with note to note relationships i.e. the lines aren't lines but are essentially moves toward and away from usually quite oblique harmonic nodal points, and that those nodal points, as they line up, are the real melodic element, albeit a rather slow-moving one and one whose relationship to all the notes that have been expended in order to nudge things around harmonically seems sort of...wasteful? Now if there were some sort of, in effect, meaningful contrapuntal relationship between the notes and the harmonic "nodes" (that's how I think Herbie Nichols' music works), you might really have something. But too often what I hear from these guys sounds like fidgeting. The only heaviliy JH-influenced player I know of who shows strong signs of coming out the other side is Mark Shim. Also, now that I think about it, has the permutation-machine aspect of JH we've been talking about been a fairly direct source for what Osby and others have been doing for some time now?

Chuck, I feel funny about "Lawrence" too, and for the life of me I can't remember why or when I switched back to the name on my driver's license, checkbook, etc. It might have had something to do with the chapter I wrote for "The Oxford Companion To Jazz" several years ago, because that's the way it is there, but I don't think anybody has ever called me "Lawrence" other than a traffic cop. Maybe there's time to change back before it's too late.

Book should be out in fall 2004 from Yale University Press; they have the final version of the manuscript as of two weeks ago. Title is "Jazz In Search Of Itself." Contents are all the stuff I've written from 1968 on that seems worth preserving (arranged in a way that seems to make sense), plus a fair amount of new framing material.

Jim, What you say reminds me of a sentence I wrote a few months ago: "Jazz is an art in which history is always happening, and it is happening to us." Of course, you could say that about a whole lot of arts, and other things too, and you'd be right, but what I mean is that once you get bonded to this music and live through some of it in conjunction with the pace and events of your own life, it's like the texture and surge of history as it's happening in both realms almost becomes a single, physical sensuous fact -- and not only that, the music can begin to feel like a music that to some perhaps unusual extent is about the way its own history is running through it and through the lives of the people who love it. Another self-quote from something that hasn't seen print yet: "Unlike the two other chief new arts--photography and motion pictures-- that arose or coalesced at some point during the nineteenth century, jazz does not have a primarily technological basis, though it would come to benefit greatly from technological means of dissemination (the phonograph record and radio). Instead, jazz’s primary 'material' is the quintessentially historical set of human circumstances under which it arose--the collision/interpenetration of particular peoples under particular conditions in a new and expanding nation that had a form of government that was based on particular principles. And perhaps it is that inaugural immersion in the flux of history that has made jazz’s further artistic development so immediate, visible, and intense--as though this art were compelled to give us a running account of its need to be made and the needs its making served."

Jim, when you say, "I wonder how much of our differing views on the cat is chronological in nature," you're right. I first heard JH when he made his first recordings, and it was like he was being taken among one good-sized segment of listeners as the more "reasonable," rational, "craft as we know it, and as we use to validate ourselves and our union card expertise, still matters most" alternative to all that nasty, threatening stuff that Trane and others had begun to do. I'm not saying that JH was thinking along those lines, but that was the feeling that was in the air (and that may be why my favorite JH of that time is his work as a sideman on "Black Fire," where Hill's structures usefully occupy, even consume, all of JH's agile intellect in the act). A possible "of a certain time" parallel is the perhaps semi-forgotten initial response to Benny Golson. Golson came to light nationally as a player at a time--1957 as I recall--when people like Whitney Balliett were not only saying that Rollins and Trane were ugly but also were yearning for some warm-toned, graceful alternative that would turn back the tide -- a Scott Hamilton before the fact, in effect. In that light, Golson's first records were greeted--by Nat Hentoff, in particular, I recall, though he was not the only one--both as though Golson were a new Lucky Thompson (the resemblences were real) and as though history could be rolled back toward a time of supposedly kinder, gentler, more cozy tenormen (not that this is fair characterization of early Golson or any L. Thompson; I'm just trying to describe the initial response to Golson and what seemed to underlie it). But then Golson's recordings began to reveal all the common ground he had with Trane, and that little trip back to a "we sort of wish bop had never happened" island paradise had to be aborted. Understand that I'm not saying that early Golson wasn't terrific; I'm just saying that sometimes good music can be put to ideological uses, often through no fault of its own, and that this, as you suggest, can shape responses. As for pretty bad music being made to serve ideological "let's turn history around" goals, see the career (after a certain point) of W. Marsalis.

Jim -- I just want to know one thing: How do you make those big BIG letters? Also, what about the inside/outside thing I mentioned? Not that I expect you to agree with me, but digging your approach to all things musical, I wonder what your take is on that aspect of JH, if in fact you see it as a real aspect at all. (I don't have the '60s BN album "In 'N' Out," but the title of the title track suggests that JH was thinking along those lines to some extent at that time.) Finally, I think you're right about JH being a reclusive spirit, a kind of musical introvert. That's one of the reasons I like some of the late laidback Verve dates; he's not trying to be more muscular and ballsy than he really is (or more than I think he really is). About the licks thing--of course everyone has them, but it's how, when, and why you use them. My problem with JH here is encapsulated in your phrase "his own idiosyncratic permutations on the standard vocabulary." That is, licks may be the wrong term for what sometimes sounds to me like the byproducts of a self-invented and (I would say) too-heavily-invested-in-for-his-own-good permutation machine (especially in terms of harmonic options), one that was pouring forth so much information of one particular sort at such a very high rate that it must have been difficult for JH to adjust the controls in order to bring other useful options into play in the moment. How seldom--or so it seems to me--does JH ever surprise himself, or even let himself be put in a position to be surprised, especially by the arrival of something direct and "simple," how seldom does he come up with (or even just allow himself to play) a phrase that isn't covered with characteristic JH dense harmonic beadwork. No, it's not literally all worked out beforehand, but the ways in which JH moves through a solo at any given period in his career do seem, at least to me, pretty foreordained when compared to other solos JH might or did play at that general time. A possible reference point here might be the somewhat older Clifford Jordan (b. 1931 vs. JH b. 1937), who like JH had a very definite set of harmonic and timbral fingerprints and a relatively surefire way of producing them but who always struck me, in any of his several somewhat different stylistic periods, as a soloist who usually had a good deal more room to manuever than JH did on the plain-and-direct-is- possible vs. allover-design-must-predominate front. But then, as Chuck says, you have to be stupid enough to bring up misgivings about JH in this house.