Larry Kart

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.

"Amazing technical control and a fully worked-out artistic sensibility which produced solos of a happy/sad clown quality" sounds exactly like what I heard from Herb Robertson live, and while I've heard much less recorded Robertson than you have, there is at least one track from one album -- Mark Helias' 1987 "The Current Set" (Enja), w/ Berne, R. Eubanks, V. Lewis, et al. -- that I think comes close to capturing him running wild. I believe the piece is "Rebound," it's definitely on Side 1. BTW, I have "The Current Set" on LP, don't know if it's on CD. Also BTW, I recall reading a Robertson interview somewhere, online probably, where he speaks of the influence he had on Dave Douglas (perhaps through direct teacher-student contact? I don't recall) and makes some friendly but wry comments on Douglas' trumpet playing.

Thanks, James. But when I heard Shim a week or so ago at the Chicago Jazz Festival with Elvin Jones, he was pretty disappointing. My impression was that this was a more conventional framework than he would have preferred (and his frontline companion was the would-be tricky and lame Delfayo Marsalis), but it seemed like Shim, trying to sound more straightahead, ended up sounding like no one much was home at all. Just a lot of almost Lockjaw-like gestures, thrown together with a sort of "Is this what you want?" lack of conviction and/or interest. By contrast, and by chance, Ed Wilkerson played in the afternoon with the local Burgess Gardiner Big Band (nice outfit), and on Gerald Wilson's "Blues for Yna Yna" was faced with a similar situation to the one Shim may have faced with Elvin -- i.e. the chart, and the style of the band as a whole, called for Wilkerson to simplify and broaden his normal solo style a fair bit in order to fit in. But he easily and naturally made that adjustment and played a powerful solo that filled his role in the piece and was, at the same time, clearly an Ed Wilkerson solo. Maybe the difference is just a matter of experience, but I wonder if it's more than that. The sense of core personality/identity we used to get and expect from every gifted soloist is now something I keep my fingers crossed for every time, because too often it goes right away. Hope I'm wrong in Shim's case, because everything else I've heard from him was strong and novel.

I recall being entranced some 30 years ago by Lee's contribution to vibraphonist-composer Gunter Hampel's "The 8th of July 1969," with a band that included Antony Braxton, Willem Breuker, Arjen Gortner, and Steve McCall. According to the 5th Edition of the Penguin Guide, it is (or was) out on CD on the Birth label.

I'm not playing either, but Barney Wilen was one fine player. Never heard anything by him that wasn't very good. If I had to choose, I'd say he was definitely more of a natural than Tubby Hayes, who as good as he could be usually sounded to me like he was working too hard at it. Also Wilen, like Wardell Gray, was one of those guys whose soul seemed to be perfectly attuned to the instrument -- it's like the tenor saxophone rolled over on its back and put its paws up in the air for him.

Oops, that's right. "Slow Drag."

Check out "Suicide City" from "Caramba." There are times when Higgins sounds like he's playing backwards. Also he talks/sings delightfully on one track.

Miles' point about Peterson as a blues player seems clear enough, whether or not you agree with it -- that Peterson employs cliched blues devices rather mechancially and too excess. As for socio-economic background as a measuring stick, I suppose you could argue that a Rockefeller heir might be a very unlikely blues player, but beyond that it quickly gets absurd. For example, take the names of all the pianists mentioned here so far and, if we had the information, rank them in terms of their socio-economic backgrounds. Who would then want to argue that this ranking determined their relative merits as blues players, with the most "deprived" being the bluesiest?

Shouldn't Horace Silver be in the running? As for Peterson, Miles' harsh old (1958) assessment seem sound to me: "[Oscar] even had to LEARN to play the blues. Everybody knows that if you flat a third, you're going to get a blues sound. He learned that and runs it into the ground worse than Billy Taylor."

I may have mentioned this before, but on page 99 of Ira Gitler's "Swing To Bop," Benny Bailey is quoted as follows: "During Miles' early formative years, they shared an apartment in New York, and Freddie, being more experienced than Miles, was sort of schooling Miles. I happen to know for instance that on the recording of 'Billie's Bounce' that Miles made with Charlie Parker, his solo was exactly the one that Freddie played for this particular blues. Evidently, Miles said that he was nervous on the date and couldn't think of anything to play, so he did Freddie's solo note for note." I'd add that both Bailey (b. 1925) and Webster (b. 1917) were from Cleveland, so there probably was some background there, and that that 'Billie's Bounce' solo is excellent and, IMO, not much like anything else that Miles played before or since.

Here's a report on a June 2002 sighting of Shim that I sent to a friend. I agree that he's among the most promising younger guys: Back from a week in Manhattan, where I heard one pretty interesting band, lead by bassist Mark Helias, with Herb Robertson, Mark Shim, Craig Taborn and drummer Eric McPherson. The drawback was Helias' themes, which were not very interesting in themselves and which, on several pieces, the frontline was expected to noodle around for many minutes at a time. Shim sounded at least as usefully eccentric as does on record, sort of like a cross between Joe Henderson and Ike Quebec, but that doesn't do him justice; the main effect is that whatever figure he seems to be thinking of when he begins a phrase turns out to side-slip into two or three or more others before the next breath is taken and/or the next sense that a phrase has begun occurs, and you pretty much can't, in the listening moment, tell where the side-slips occur--the effect is of an oblique layering of lines. Emotionally this doesn't come across as trickiness or a "method" at work but as a kind of lush courting of disruption, a la Tyrone Washington perhaps, or come to think of it, Ed Wilkerson. Whatever, Shim certainly shows promise. Robertson was far beyond anything I've heard from him on record, though perhaps I haven't heard the right ones. What he does that's most striking is use a plunger mute not so much for color but to further break down rhythmically an already multi-noted, swift tempo passage. That is, each note that's already been articulated quite a bit by lips and fingers can be broken down further by the plunger into "notes" of different timbres, interspersed with leaps (Shavers-like perhaps) into a near freak register. Robertson's control of this process is close to mind-boggling, and his goal is primarily rhythmic and line-shaping, I think, not coloristic; in any case, again, I heard no trickiness or a desire to charm but a technique driven by considerable intensity of thought; there were times when it seemed that the 1945-6 Gillespie was in the room, not in terms of sonic resemblance but dramatized exuberance-scariness. This was the most straightahead format in which I've heard Taborn, and he got into some very lush, neo-Hancock grooves.

Re "Homecoming": I believe that Woody's band was not the only thing that Dexter "borrowed" around that time. He also hooked up with publicist Maxine Gregg (a.k.a. "Little Red" of "Little Red's Fantasy"), a development that went a long way toward lowering Woody's spirits when he discovered upon returning from a summer European tour that Gregg had cleaned out their apartment and left him for Dex.

Those David Himmelstein liner notes to "Settin' the Pace" are something else. I particular like the line about Dexter briefly leaving the studio to perform "his bebop ablutions."

That brings to mind the very fine tenorman who took Young's place with Russell, Paul Plummer, who became an even more striking and individual player in later years. I know of three recordings of his work besides what the two albums he did with Russell ("The Stratus Seekers" and "The Outer View") -- a 1986 LP, "Detroit Opium Den" (Resound), with drummer Ron Enyard, guitarist Tony Byrne, and organist Steve Corn, and two Cadence CDs, rec. 4/3/97 at a gig in Indianapolis, "Driving Music Vols. 1 &2," with Al Kiger, Enyard, pianist Charles Wilson, and bassist Lou Lausche. (All these musicians were based in Indianapolis and/or Cincinnati.) Unfortunately, per a phone conversation I had with Enyard a couple of years back, Plummer began to suffer from severe dental problems, at some point after the '97 recording had to have all or most of his teeth removed, and is no longer able to play very much if at all. He was special, though -- perhaps comparable stylistically to the Rollins of the Cherry-Grimes-Higgins-band era but his own man really. And if you only know his work with Russell, he did continue to grow.

It's probably inseparable from the direct-pickup issue, but I recall that early Ron Carter (up to say 1969) was one kind of bass player -- hip, alert, inventive, tasteful, etc. -- and that Carter from the '70s on was often twangy, self-indulgent, even just plain obvious and boring or crude, as though everything he played was being placed within quotation marks. At some point in that decade, his presence on a record became a reason to avoid it for me, unless there were some powerful other reason not to. Before that, though, the standard was very high -- not only his work with Miles of course but also, say, Sam Rivers' "Fuschia Swing Song" and a terrific album under Bobby Timmons' name, "The Soul Man" I think it was, with Wayne Shorter and Jimmy Cobb.

Yes, Jim, I did write that review of "Thesaurus" for Down Beat back in '69. What I said about Perkins' bari playing was: "'Calamus' features Bill Perkins on baritone, trying to sound tough. I admire his tenor playing, but I don't think he has yet mastered the larger horn." I wonder if Clare Fischer might have been "projecting" a bit, as they say in the trade -- the review did make some very snotty, smart-alecky remarks about his writing, which I wish I could retroactively dial-down about a third, in part because a remastered CD reissue of the album eventually went a long way toward clarifying some of the close-voiced reed textures that on the LP sounded very muddy. Why Perkins left the "sound" behind and, as I think he admits in the Cadence interview, tried to get tough, is a story that's pretty much told in the music he made, as well as in the interview. The most successful latter-day Perkins I know is on the two Fresh Sounds albums he made with Lennie Niehaus, because Lennie's extremely oblique harmonic and rhythmic thinking makes Perk's more off-the-wall forays sound less ... I think "gawky" would be the right word. Niehaus and Perkins are very effective when soloing simultaneously. Also, there's the late album "I Wished On the Moon" (Candid), where Perk played with Rob Pronk's string-laden Hilversum Orchestra, and as he says "the sound" suddenly came back to him. In the Cadence interview Perk says that on an unreleased 1958 date of Jimmy Van Heusen tunes that he did for Dick Bock, he "sort of played a half-baked imitation of Sonny Rollins, without getting into Sonny Rollins, and Dick was really disgusted.... But then I felt the urge to change because the thing is at the time I really hadn't studied the music....I was starting to hear the Sonny Rollinses of this world ... and trying to play like that, but I had no idea what they were doing. Now I think I have a good idea of what they wwre doing."

Lovely, true thoughts Jim. I had a similar response to "Almost" (though I don't recall sleeping with that solo) and the rest of Perkins' work on "2 Degrees" back when it came out, with that very West Coast-looking girl on the cover. Try to track down the interview Perkins did with Cadence that ran in Nov. 1995. As I recall, he speaks about being in that mid-'50s "zone" but also about his need/desire to leave it, in part because he didn't think he was tough enough rhythmically or harmonically compared to other players on the scene. He had a lot of self-doubt as a player and speaks of this with honesty and insight. It's among the most revealing accounts of what it was like to be a white West Coast guy of that era, not that Perkins wasn't very much an individual.

Had the good fortune to heard Bailey live in Chicago in the early '80s, I think. He was in great form. Of the recordings I know, I'm particularly fond of "For Heaven's Sake" (Hot House), with Tony Coe, Horace Parlan, Jimmy Woode, and Idris Muhammad, rec. 1988. I recall reading somewhere that BB tended to get a bit uptight when he was the leader on a studio date, but not this day. Very relaxed rhythm section and an excellent job of engineering too. BTW, does anyone have further info on BB's claim, on page 99 of Ira Gitler's book "Swing To Bop," that Miles' solo on "Billie's Bounce"with Bird was a note for note re-creation of a favorite Freddie Webster chorus? Certainly that solo doesn't sound much like anything else Miles was playing at the time.

Excerpt from the notes I wrote for the Mosaic Tristano-Konitz-Marsh box: "...in December 1957, Marsh will almost come to grief in the company of Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. Describing the partnership between Chambers and Jones in the liner notes to Hank Mobley’s Poppin’, which was recorded less than two months before the first of the two dates that make up the Atlantic Marsh album, I wrote that the drummer and bassist "shared a unique concept of where ‘one’ is--just a hair behind the beat but rigidly so, with the result that the time has a stiff-legged, compulsive quality. The beat doesn’t flow but jerks forward in a series of spasmodic leaps, creating a climate of nervous intensity that was peculiar to the era. Either the soloist jumps or he is fried to a crisp on the spot." Well, Marsh did survive the encounter, and he is a bit more at ease on the next date in January 1958, when Paul Motion takes the place of Jones and pianist Ronnie Ball drops out. For even though Chambers’ broad rhythmic impasto, so full of directional energy, still threatens to ride right over the nodes of rhythmic ambivalence that Warne must leave exposed, the absence of a chordal instrument makes just that much more space available to the soloist, who is especially fluent on "Yardbird Suite." One wonders, though, what this album would have been like if [Oscar] Pettiford and [Kenny] Clarke had been present." But don't let that discourage you from getting the Mosaic box, though. It's full of wonderful music. A Chambers question: Does anyone know who wrote about (and where) his deliberately playing between the notes pitchwise at times in a walking context -- say, inserting a note that was a fair bit sharp beween two that were on the button in order to give his lines an extra edge, a bit more forward lean?

"Step Lightly" is a nutty piece, akin to some of Horace's writing on "Stylings of Silver."

Let's no forget "Fontainbleu." While it's a bit episodic (intentionally, I'd say), much of it is gorgeous -- and lovingly played by Dorham et al.

Ted Brown's analysis of Warne's solo on "Black Jack" stands out for me. He really sees the trees and the forest. Also, on page 210 (the book needs the index it doesn't have), Brown relates a very intense anecdote about his relationship to Warne, one that cuts several ways at once.