Larry Kart

Another Chicago late '60s memory, probably from 1967: Drummer Gerald Donovan (Ajaramu) and pianist/organist Amina Claudine Meyers had a gig at a bar on, I think, Stony Island Ave. Don't know if Roscoe M. and Maurice McIntyre (Kalaparush) were both sitting in or one of them was part of the band and the other was sitting in, but they were both there that night and in very relaxed form, yet this was a neighborhood bar, not an AACM concert, so as I recall there was some playful sense in the air of "How much are we (or they) going to get away with?" It was some customer's birthday, thus the inevitable request for "Happy Birthday." Roscoe, Maurice et al. not only played "Happy Birthday," but played it with as much motivically based intensity as, say, Monk played "Little Rootie Tootie," and as I recall, they played angular, beautifully logical variations on "HB" for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes -- not at all broad or parodistic, just taking what was given and running with it, though there was an underlying air of deadpan I'm not sure what to call it, maybe a distant echo of Buster Keaton. I recall that the audience was more than pleased.

An excerpt from a piece I wrote for Down Beat's 1968 year book, Music '69 (published in Jan. '69). The event described probably took place in April or maybe August 1965, the two times that year the Coltrane Quartet was in Chicago: "The second Chicago-based player of the new music I heard was Roscoe Mitchell [bassist Russell Thorne was the first]. Coltrane was in town, and Elvin Jones was appearing at an off-night session [at a club on Wells St., probably the Brown Shoe, definitely not the Plugged Nickel--and I think it was on a Sunday afternoon, not an off-night]. As Jerry Figi once put it, Elvin was laying about "with a vengeance, one of those prehistoric movie-monsters crashing through a city…"--in the process wiping out a James Moody-like tenor player [his name was Bob Poulian]. Suddenly, in the middle of a tune, a young alto saxophonist climbed on the stand and played a solo that met Jones more than half-way. What he played, a version of the bird-like cries that Dolphy used, was inseparable from the way he played it. His raw, piercing sound was powerful enough to cut through the drums, and Elvin found himself playing with and against someone. When the saxophonist had finished, he climbed down and disappeared into the audience. Someone was able to answer my question with the name Roscoe Mitchell, and I filed it for future reference."

In case Chuck isn't in a mood right now to go over those days again, here are links to three interviews in which he does: http://www2.kenyon.edu/Projects/Ottenhoff/.../Aacm/nessa.htm http://www.jazzweekly.com/interviews/cnessa.htm http://delmark.com/rhythm.nessa.htm They were amazing times, and Chuck, I'd say, was more than a midwife. The musicians involved would have to speak for themselves, but from where I sat, his commitment, savvy, taste, and across-the-board honesty had a great deal to do with that scene's flowering the way it did. I think of it like this: Imagine those musicians and either no one (or no one much) wants to record them, or those who do lack Chuck's qualities/abilities/attitude. The scene itself, not to mention our record of it so to speak, would not have been the same, and to an extent that's difficult to calculate.

Chris, Charles Burnett's segment of "The Blues" sounds like a disaster (haven't seen any of them myself), but I have seen two of his fiction films, "To Sleep With Anger" (1990) and "The Glass Shield" (1994), and they were excellent, especially the first one. Later on he did cross paths with Oprah on a project ("The Wedding"), which may have messed up his mind.

Ooops -- make that the Lost Cosmic Unity label. My own Cosmic Unit is, however, still missing.

David, I like "New Ideas" too and had the pleasure of reviewing an excellent but apparently quite obscure Al Francis trio album (with John Neves and Joe Hunt) from the mid 1980s, "Jazz Bohemia Revisited" on the Lost Cosmic Unit label. This led to brief amiable contact with Francis -- phone conversation or by letter I don't recall. You say you knew Francis at one time. Do you know what's happened to him? He was a helluva player and an original, maybe in a class with Walt Dickerson if there were more of his work to go by.

Interesting to get a former Borders employee perspective. I guessed there was something fishy about this coupon, though it didn't occur to me that it had been dicked around with in the way it seems to have been. When I tried to use it (on an $18.99 classical disc), suspicions were confirmed. The coupon coding when entered said that the price was now $7.60 (plus tax), i.e. 60 per cent off! The bemused clerk noted the discrepancy and then sold it to me anyway. Not a particularly good feeling but probably not the worst thing I've ever done.

Others who were around back then can confirm or disagee, but my experience was that encountering Coltrane on "Mainstream '58" in the context of that time was absolutely thrilling/shocking, even if (or especially if) you already were familiar with and knocked out by "Blue Train" and all the various Prestige dates from '57-8, under his own name and as a sideman, that flank "Mainstream." Fo whatever reasons, the phase of/style of Trane that Ira Gitler dubbed "sheets of sound" made ( or seemed to make, in terms of recordings) its full debut here, and again it was thrilling/shocking. I think that Trane's partners here had a lot to do with this -- in particular the several sorts of fairly extreme "laid-backness" that Harden and Louis Hayes display e.g. the former's slow-mo lyricism and the latter's glassily even, behind-the-beat ride cymbal work. Together with Doug Watkins' marvelously precise and also fairly laid-back time feel (laid-back by comparison with P. Chamber's more forward-leaning approach), this perhaps gave Trane just the sort of backdrop -- at once very alive yet kind of "neutral," if you know what I mean (a la, maybe the Basie Band rhythm section of the late '30s) -- that left him free to dump all the snakes out of the sack.

Shaw is a great clarinetist and bandleader, but am I the only one who, after watching "Time Is All You've Got," felt that he also is one of the all-time narcissisitc jerks? Also, and in much the same vein that his vaunted (esp. by Shaw himself) intellectuality is fairly hollow because it's mostly for show and/or a case of wishful mirror-gazing?

A lovely record, as are almost all the Vanguards. BTW, in later years Ruby, being Ruby, professed to despise all the playing he did back then. Nice to know the name of the place where these were recorded; the feeling of "space" around the band was akin to Columbia's 30th St. studio but a shade less reverberant. Who needs stereo? Also BTW, the person who screwed up the Vanguard reissues, initially at least (haven't checked to see if he's still got the gig) is Sam Charters. A couple of years ago I sent Vanguard a detailed, angry complaint about the hash he'd made of the Mel Powell material -- mis-attributions, jumbled sessions, etc. (Charters apparently didn't listen to the material or bother to look at the liner notes of the original LPs, or both). Vanguard's reply was noncommital, but a friend of mine who knows Charters says that Sam did get yelled at a bit and that, as might be expected, he was very upset that someone out there had made his life more difficult.

P.S. The NY club where I saw Mobley in such grim shape was The Tin Palace.

BTW, I'd seen that piece of John's before but didn't remember it well enough. What a beautiful, soulful, insightful piece of writing. There are two lives at stake and on view there -- Hank's and John's.

Chuck, I remember (or think I remember) being at the Jug, Von, Hank, Hank Crawford affair, but if so my memories of it are very dim -- perhaps because it was kind of a mess? Also -- and how many times does this happen? -- I probably wasn't thinking along "focus on Mobley and treasure the memory" lines because I didn't know how close he was to the end. On the other hand, I did hear Hank in New York, before or probably after this -- at some club-based "festival" with, I think Philly Joe in the band -- and he was in very poor shape, almost unable to get enough air through the horn to make a sound. That was indelible because it was so sad, almost shocking. Don't think I ever heard another great player, in person at least, who was in a similar condition but still trying to play -- maybe Lester Young with JATP in fall 1955, before he was hospitalized for a month or so and then came out to make "Jazz Giants '56" and "Pres and Teddy." As I recall, the New York thing with Hank just seemed cruel, like somebody should have stopped it, but maybe Hank himself felt otherwise, given the alternatives.

Guess I need to explore Smith more; all I know is the old Roost "Moonlight in Vermont" album. BTW, looking at my previous post. I notice an unintended ambiguity. I meant that Farlow's range of dynamics and touch had increased quite a bit over what I'd heard from before, not that he had gone beyond Tatum's range of dynamics etc.

Oops. Yes, Farlow, too. BTW, I heard him live in the mid-'80s in Chicago, with a bassist (probably Larry Grey) and a good boppish drummer (Robert Shy), and he was in a place that seemed to be a fair bit beyond anything I'd heard on record from him, incredibly fluid in thought and articulation, virtually Tatumesque, and with a good deal broader range in dynamics and touch, all sorts of expressive shadings as seen from an express train. In fact, the speed and intensity of meaningful musical events that night seemed to me to be at or close to the limit of what the human mind (or at least my mind) could assimilate. I got the feeling that what I heard was not the result of the fairly common difference between live and studio musical selves (the great Farlow material taped in Ed Fuerst's apartment is not stylistically different from studio Farlow of the time) but rather of a late-ish development in his overall musical approach that, as far as I know, was not documented on record.

FWIW, my old boss at Down Beat, Dan Morgenstern, told me that he went do an interview with Lloyd in his early "Love-In"/"Dream Weaver" hey-day, and when Lloyd answered the knock on the hotel room door, he said that it was too bad that Dan hadn't arrived a minute or too earlier, when Lloyd had been levitating. As I recall, Dan politely inquired further, and Lloyd explained that he meant that quite literally, that he'd been hovering a foot or two off the floor for some time that afternoon.

Django and Christian, in classes of their own. Grant Green is Grant Green. Otherwise, Jimmy Raney, in the top group of improvisers regardless of instrument (and an influence on Green, to complete the circle).

There's some wonderful, utterly relaxed and genuine, Getz blues playing on this album, maybe one of the earliest where he really got things together in that area: The Soft Swing (Verve MGV 8321) Stan Getz (ts) Mose Allison (p) Addison Farmer (B) Jerry Segal (d) NYC, July 12, 1957 All the Things You Are, Pocono Mac, Down Beat, To the Ends of the Earth, Bye Blues There's some superb stoptime playing from Stan on both blues (Pocono Mac and Down Beat), the whole thing just a lovely day in the studio. Don't see that it's out on CD in the U.S. right now, but it probably was/is out in Japan.

I like Herb Ellis a fair amount of time -- especially once in-person in the mid-'80s, when he was away from the O. Peterson orbit (BTW, Jim, "Twangity-splangity-fleep-floop-doo" is pure genius) -- but on Nothing But the Blues to my ears he and even more so Getz seem to be trying so damn hard. There are couple of places where Stan almost brays like a mule. My guess is that Roy's macho presence kind of freaked him out.

"Actually, I think he does go a little Cockney at one point - perhaps you have to be British to hear it." Maybe it's at the very beginning -- "Oiy like the sunrise" instead of "I like the sunrise."

Great on paper maybe, but I've always found it rather artificially heated and "off" in some way, as though the twanginess of Ellis' conception of the blues, combined with Getz's hardbreathing attempt to be even bluesier and more twangy (if you can be twangy on the tenor saxophone, Getz does it here), led the whole thing to curdle. Also, Stan Levey's typically mircoscopic ride cymbal beat, which I like a lot in other contexts, is not what was needed here. Maybe someone like Gus Johnson would have saved things.

I'm of two minds about the Mulligan Concert Jazz Band -- liking it to some extent but feeling that the time feel (overall as well as that of the rhythm section) was a little too buckety-buckety, and that too much of the writing had tense, pinched-shoe tightness to it. But for those who really like the MCJB, there are two topnotch concert recordings from their 1960 European tour that are a good bit more intense than anything that I know of that will be on the Mosaic set -- a 2-CD set on RTE (which used to, and may still, be available at Berkshire Record Outlet for a song) and a single CD on TCB. Much material crops up on both discs, but Zoot is in uncommonly serious form (for that time, IMO) on the TCB on "Apple Core" (the notes refer to him "going positively berserk," which is not far from the truth), and the band as a whole sounds excellent on both the Paris (RTE) and Zurich (TCB) concerts. The RTE, if I recall, is especially well-recorded, particularly the rhythm section, which helps a lot.

I'm of two minds about the Mulligan Concert Jazz Band -- liking it to some extent but feeling that the time feel (overall as well as that of the rhythm section) was a little too buckety-buckety, and that too much of the writing had tense, pinched-shoe tightness to it. But for those who really like the MCJB, there are two topnotch concert recordings from their 1960 European tour that are a good bit more intense than anything that I know of that will be on the Mosaic set -- a 2-CD set on RTE (which used to, and may still, be available at Berkshire Record Outlet for a song) and a single CD on TCB. Much material crops up on both discs, but Zoot is in uncommonly serious form (for that time, IMO) on the TCB on "Apple Core" (the notes refer to him "going positively berserk," which is not far from the truth), and the band as a whole sounds excellent on both the Paris (RTE) and Zurich (TCB) concerts. The RTE, if I recall, is especially well-recorded, particularly the rhythm section, which helps a lot.

Christern, I agree with you about a lot of Al Hibbler, but "I Like the Sunrise" (which I love, along with the rest of "Liberian Suite") is inconceivable to me (and might not have been conceivable to Ellington) without the timbral eccentricities of Hibbler's voice as a given. (Don't know if Chuck agrees with me on this.) At the least, we can be grateful that on this occasion Hibbler didn't do his mock-Cockney thing.

Yes, that's the interview. Kudos to Joe. As a former journalist, I'm sure he must have been handling his side of things very well to get so much good talk out of Robertson, who certainly sounds like he's a great guy in addition to being a fine player.