Larry Kart

I won't presume to speak for Chuck, but because I share his mixed to negative feelings about Joe Henderson and admire T. Washington, I'll take a shot. About JH: He was IMO a very formulaic, licks-bound player (albeit a hip one at times, for what being hip did for you at that time and place), his sound was the saxophone equivalent of the sound of a "mike" singer (I heard him once live paired with Johnny Griffin in the mid-'80s, and next to Griffin he was close to inaudible), and especially in the '60s I couldn't stand the way he'd bounce between "inside" and "outside" playing in the course of a single solo, as though the "outside" stuff was more or less a noise element. It's in that realm that T. Washington is an utterly different player--when TW goes "out," he goes to a place that he has to go and that's no less logical to him, if sometimes bizarrely logical, than where he's been before; when JH goes "out", it's like he's saying "Excuse me, I have to go the mens room for a while, but when I come back you can be sure I'll have washed my hands." That said, JH does have his moments. I like some of his Milestone stuff; loved a live performance by the band of that era that included Curtis Fuller and Stanley Clarke and found some of his late wispy Verve stuff kind of touching.

Gerald Donavan is that Chicago drummer's given name. He later went under the name Ajaramu, played in a duo in the '70s with pianist/organist Amina Claudine Myers.

Lazaro -- No, damnit, I wasn't there that night. I'd stopped writing about jazz for the Chi. Tribune in 1988 and might have been out of town on family business during that Jazz Fest.

Jim, actually the version of those "Worktime" liner notes that will be in my (he said, clearing his throat) forthcoming book has a different ending, in part because "The rest of 'Worktime's' delights etc." was a straight steal from the end of one of Martin Williams' liner notes. Why I did that I now have no idea -- I almost certainly had time to think of some other way to bring the thing to an end; maybe it was a kind of joke? -- but I thought that in 2003 I should adopt a slightly different exit strategy. About you and "Worktime" in Denton--to complete the circle perhaps, "Sonny Rollins Plus 4" was the first record I bought with my own money, i.e. money I'd earned, not from an allowance. Our blond wood Webcor phonograph was in the living room, where my Dad would read the paper in his easy chair after dinner (a real "Leave It To Beaver" scene), and every night for I think several weeks I'd play the album, usually repeating "Pent-Up House" several times -- in effect, trying to memorize Clifford and Sonny's solos on that track without having that as a conscious goal. Finally my Dad exploded: "Don't you have any other records!" Funny thing was that while I of course understood what he meant as soon as he said it, until he did, the thought hadn't entered my mind that what I was doing was anything other than logical and necessary.

Jim, no I didn't write that DB review of "East Broadway Rundown." I did write the liner notes for an early '70s LP reissue of "Worktime," though, which was a lot of fun because that probably was THE album that proclaimed that Rollins was who he had become, the first one he made (or at least the first he made under his own name) after his period of woodshedding in Chicago. I may have mentioned this before, but a drummer I knew secondhand who was then at the U. of Illinois worked up some sort of Rube Goldberg device so that when his alarm clock went off, instead of ringing, it triggered his record player to drop the needle on side one, track one of "Worktime" -- "There's No Business Like Show Business."

Another thing about the "maybe he knew EVERYTHING" Rollins of the mid' to late-'50s. It wasn't though he or his music came across as some inherently distant and/or bewilderingly ecstatic genius-type thing a la Bird or Coltrane. Instead, it was utterly down-to-earth and street-cornerlike, made out of stuff that everyone knew (or anyone could know) and then just built from the inside out and way upwards in a way that seemed to say, "You could do this too in your way, You could see what I see and know what I know--Maybe you already do." Jim, I think the key to what's happened to Rollins over time -- in addition to the dental problems of the late '60s that You Must Be mentioned -- is that the athletic, in-the-moment relationship that a soloist must have to his horn and his ongoing thoughts rests on certain assumptions ("assumptions" isn't the right word, but as a player yourself you probably know what I mean: a kind of basic faith that the whole process is worth it/makes sense, for yourself and others), and that for a long time in various ways Rollins found that this "faith" for him was wavering or ebbing. For a time, of course, he built that sense of doubt right into his music (Wayne Shorter did too, in his way), as both men had to do because that doubt was a big part of who they were. But eventually...

Late, thanks for the nudge. I listened to "Movin' Out" for the first time in a long while, and it was beautiful reminder of the early side of the time when Rollins seemed to be (and probably was, at least for some of us) the most important man on the planet. The "speaking eighth notes" thing you mentioned was at or close to the heart of it -- I think of it as a way he could build multiply shaded dramatic, sometimes ironic, points of view right into the texture of the music, as though the instrument and the thinking behind it had become spontaneously orchestral, a la Ellington or Mahler. And even though it's probably a thing that's impossible to talk about, the sense that the music gave you of Rollins's take on/grasp of the world we all lived in was that he knew EVERYTHING that mattered, or at least more than anyone else--accumulated novel wisdom plus the authority of an on-the-edge-of-the-horizon explorer. Can't think of any people in the history of any art who were more that way than Rollins was back then.

What about the rhythm section on the excellent 1958 Stitt Argo date ("Propapagoon," "This Is Always," etc.). issued with no liner notes (cover art on both sides) and reissued on CD in 1990 on MCA? The notes say its "possibly" Barry Harris, William Austin, and Frank Gant, but no way that's Barry Harris. I've always felt that. believe it or not, it's the Ramsey Lewis Trio (Lewis, El Dee Young, Redd Holt)--Young's distinctive bass playing being the giveaway.

Just listened to Natural Essence (the old LP with its murky sound--this due to the Liberty-era pressing I assume, not RVG). The great track for me is "Yearning For Love"--the piece itself (the relationship between Shaw's part and main line!), and then Washington's appropriately yearning/explosive just barely on the rails at times solo. However you want to characterize what Washington is playing, that's the kind of stuff that can't be faked.

As the idiot who gave "Natural Essence" a ***1/2 review (out of *****) for Down Beat when it came out (in a review that coupled it with the first or second Steve Miller album!!!) and who then grew to love the album in general and Washington in particular, let me quote from a piece I wrote back in '86 that touches upon "Natural Essence" by way of a Stanley Crouch remark about the then-current band Out of the Blue: "These young men aren't about foisting the clichés of twentieth-century European music on jazz," writes Crouch of a group called Out of the Blue, which tries very hard to sound like the clock had been turned back to 1965. "It is an ensemble luminously in tune with integrity." But if "integrity" and "foisting" are indeed the issues, it seems fair to ask how the music of Out of the Blue's eponymous first album stands up alongside a representative and stylistically similar album from the late 1960s: tenor saxophonist Tyrone Washington's Natural Essence, which includes trumpeter Woody Shaw and alto saxophonist James Spaulding. The two groups share the same instrumentation and the same musical techniques, as the heated rhythmic angularities of bebop are linked to free-floating modal harmonies. And even if Out of the Blue's trumpeter Mike Mossman and alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett haven't directly modeled themselves on Shaw and Spaulding, they certainly sound as though they have. But the emotional tone of the two albums is quite different. While most of the members of Out of the Blue sound as though they thought of their music as a style (that is, as a series of rules one must adopt and accept), the music of Washington and his partners is fundamentally explosive, a discontented elegance that keeps zooming off in search of extreme emotional states. In fact a passionate need to exceed itself lies at the heart of Washington’s music. And while stylistic patterns can be found on Natural Essence, they only emphasize the mood of turbulence and flux--defining the brink over which Washington constantly threatens to jump. So even though the music of Washington and his mid-sixties peers was less openly radical than that of Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, it was by no means a separate phenomenon. Indeed, the strains of transition that supposedly were confined to the jazz avant garde may have been even more violently felt in the music that lay, so to speak, just to the Right of it.

Re: "Opinions are like you know what. Everybody has one." If you know the music of Lester Young and Brew Moore, the statement that Moore was "a very good tenor player if you want to hear somebody playing Lester Young riffs. But he never went much further than that" is an "opinion" that can only be based on a denial of -- or (more likely in this case, a simple lack of -- information, combined with a need to sound authoritative no matter what. This may be the root cause of the behavior that Christiern referred to. In any case, Moore, while deeply influenced by Young, took that influence and built something on it that was quite individual. Certainly no one could confuse Moore's style (i.e. his sound or his phrasing) with that of Young or those of any of Moore's Young-influenced compatriots -- Getz, Sims, Eager, Cohn, Steward, etc. If you can't hear that--to quote an old line of Le Roi Jones--you need ear braille.

A lot to respond to in the Giddins interview, but I'm baffled by this passage: "The saxophonist Brew Moore once said that if you don't play like Lester Young, you are playing wrong. That is why most of the people reading this conversation never heard of Moore -- a very good tenor player if you want to hear somebody playing Lester Young riffs. But he never went much further than that." If Giddins thinks that all Brew Moore did was play Lester Young riffs, he is very much mistaken --as one of Giddins' mentors, Dan Morgenstern, would be the first to tell him.

Miles had to be head of the CIA.

The poodle story sounds plausible to me. In that vein, does anyone remember when Dizzy Gillespie ran for president in, I think, 1964 and was asked in an interview in Down Beat who the members of his cabinet would be. He said that he would name Peggy Lee as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare because "she's always so nice to her musicians." (Mingus was his Secretary of Defense.) I met Lee after a show in the late '70s or early '80s, and the closer you got to her the more indistinct her features became. Or at least that was the effect.

I know about Bock's editing habits in part because the product that he released over the years bore the marks of it. Also, as I recall, knowledgable people--musicians, other fans-- would say something about it from time to time. Finally, Bill Perkins spoke about it directly in a mid'-90s Cadence interview. As for other interesting jazz info "like that" that I might have, are you, as they say, vibing me? A whole lot of people here know (e.g. Christiern and Chuck Nessa), or think they know, a whole lot of things. You'll have to be more specific. Or is it just gossip you're looking for?

One apparent sad/ugly offshoot of the Peggy Lee vs. Disney lawsuit over "Lady and the Tramp," in which Lee rightly prevailed, is that her name was not mentioned in the "necrology" segment of Oscar broadcast in the year of her death (2002), although the names of a great many other Hollywood figures were, including more than a few less prominent than she was. (Lee was, of course, in addition to "Lady and the Tramp," an Oscar nominee as best supporting actress for "Pete Kelly's Blues.") It's possible that the failure to mention her name on the Oscar broadcast was just a big goof, but I think it's more likely that it was a deliberate act of revenge for her lawsuit.

I wrote them in English and they appeared that way over here; maybe they were translated into Japanese for that market, maybe not--I certainly couldn't tell. A fair number of Blue Notes, some (maybe all) previously unissued at the time, came out over here on LP by way of Japan in the early '80s -- for example, Mobley's "Poppin,'" Grant Green's "Matador," the two-trombone album with Slide Hampton and Curtis Fuller, the Sonny Clark with Wilbur Ware, etc. Pretty sure that all of that stuff has made it onto CD in one way or another. I'm still hoping for a Conn. version of Tyrone Washington's "Natural Essence." I have the old LP, but in terms of sound quality (not music) it was not what it should have been for a Van Gelder-engineered recording, undoubtedly for reasons that were beyond his control.

A shrewd but unfortunately brief survey of the underlying issues that have shaped jazz in Australia is Terry Martin's chapter "Jazz In Canada and Australia" in "The Oxford Companion to Jazz." Martin, a native of Adelaide who has lived in Chicago for many years, rightly emphasizes the remarkable work of the best Australian "revivalists" (the Bell brothers, Ade Monsborough, and above all the late Dave Dallwitz), who aren't really revivalists but musicians who have at their best built something beautiful and new upon their fondnes for bits and pieces of the jazz past. (Dallwitz is one of the great jazz composers; check out his "Ern Malley Suite.") Among Australian modernists, I've been knocked out by Bernie McGann (again, that homemade deep transformation of non-Australian impulses is present) and am interested by Mark Simmonds, and Scott Tinkler.

I wrote the liner notes for the early 1980s Japanese Blue Note LP original issue of "Minor Move" but have not seen the current American CD reissue (or maybe I did but didn't buy it because I have the Mosaic set). Anyway, does someone who does have the current issue of "Minor Move" tell me whether my notes are used there. Just curious.

Dick Bock of Pacific Jazz was notorious for editing (and, in the further issues of the same performances, re-editing) material that probably would have been better left alone. Also, as Bill Perkins explained in a Cadence interview, apart from the decision to edit or not edit, Bock was a terrible editor in mechanical terms (i.e. in handling the tools of the trade) and in terms of being able to keep track of the form of a piece; thus some of the edits resulted in dropped bars. etc. This led to Perkins' getting into that end of the business himself, as a form of aid and self-defense; apparently Bock welcomed the help.

Just to keep things straight, Walter van de Leur's book "Soemthing To Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn" demonstrates beyond any doubt that four movements from "The Queen's Suite," six of nine movements from "The Nutcracker Suite," four of five movements from the "Peer Gynt Suite," "Agra," "Isfahan," and "Blue Bird of Delhi" from "Far East Suite," and "Star-Crossed Lovers," "Half the Fun," and "Up and Down, Up and Down" from "Such Sweet Thunder" are wholly the work of Strayhorn. I recommend the book to anyone who thinks that the music of the two men was indistinguishable, a fiction that some of those around Ellington (and Duke himself at times) were eager to promote. On the other hand, Strayhorn and Ellington were using much the same timbral palette (the actual members of the then-current Ellington orchestra), even though there were clear structural and harmonic differences between their composing/arranging styles.

All of tenor saxophonist Walt Weiskopf's Criss Cross albums are worth checking out. He's taken an aspect of early Wayne Shorter and run off with it to a place that's all his own, I think. And he swings like crazy. The one with Joe Locke as his frontline partner may be his best blowing date, but all the ones with several horns in the ensemble are strong -- he's a fine composer/arranger.

Heard Ayler sit in with the Tchicai-Rudd Quartet (probably with Louis Worrell and Milford Graves) in, I think, spring 1966 (in effect, the "New York Eye and Ear Control" band without Don Cherry) in a loft above the Vanguard. Hope I never forget what the sheer size of Ayler's sound felt like; it came up through the soles of your feet and went out through the hair on your head. It was huge, but I wouldn't call it loud because it needed to be that size for genuine musical reasons--to bring all those overtones to life, for one. Only thing I've ever heard like it is Roscoe Mitchell in full flight, though Mitchell is Mitchell and Ayler is Ayler.

A passage from John Litweiler's "The Freedom Principle" that may have some bearing on Chuck's "sewing machine" remark: "The relaxed, subdued atmosphere of West Coast jazz had a healthy acceptance of stylistic diversity and innovation, but it also accepted the emotional world of pop music at face value; even original themes are treated like more hip, more grown-up kinds of pop music. In bop's freest flights it could not escape reality, but these Californians were not aware of the conflict of values that was the source of bop." I know, Mulligan and Baker were not really Californians, but I still think this makes a lot of sense. Also, Mulligan as a soloist usually strikes me as pretty earthbound, rhythmically and melodically; I think Baker is the real player of the two, though they do fit together damn well in what is undoubtedly Mulligan's concept.

A Donald Lambert-Tatum story from Dick Wellstood's great notes to Lambert's Pumpkin LP: "One night Lambert got all liquored up in Jersey [where he lived] and headed for Harlem, looking to do battle with Tatum, who was generally acknowledged to be the King. He found Tatum and Marlowe Morris (considered second only to Tatum), sitting in the back room of some bar. Lambert flung himself at the piano, crying, 'I've come for you, Tatum!' and things of that nature, and launched into some blistering stride. Tatum heard him out. When it was all over and Lambert stood up, defiant, Tatum said quietly, 'Take him, Marlowe.' "