Larry Kart

About "Playful Intentions," Phil has a great sound (bottom to top--and there is quite a top at times), he'll follow an evolving line to the ends of the known universe no matter what and make it work, he has no licks I can detect, he writes and picks nice tunes, and the album is an album, not just a collection of tracks. Also, everyone else is in fine form, especially Bill Carrothers, and it all feels unusually "open" -- little or no sense that anyone is presenting themselves, strutting their stuff.

Best choice I know -- and I heard of a guy who actually used it -- is Sonny Rollins' "There's No Business Like Show Business" from "Worktime."

Maybe the most loony but unfailingly interesting (at least in certain moods) "too written" jazz record I know is the Rogers-Andre Previn RCA album "Collaboration" (from I think 1954 or '55), with Rogers arranging standards on one side that are directly followed by Previn originals on those changes; then on the other side they switch roles. Previn not only solos a good deal but also plays a prominent role in the ensemble on many tracks (he's not yet into his Hampton Hawes-Horace Silver bag, though that's within sight); Rogers is about as cute-clever as he ever got; and the execution by the band (Shank, Cooper, Giuffre, Bernhart, Manne, etc.) of some extremely tricky writing is often breathtaking. Yes, it's incredibily precious and bitty, but to me it's redeemed because it's also quite mad, like certain kinds of vintage '50s science fiction. Now that I think of it, Rogers dug some of that SF, or at least knew about it; his first Atlantic album, "Martians Go Home," is named after a very good SF novel of the time by Frederic Brown.

Yes, to several of the names mentioned above, but while part of me felt this was a bit stale or too obvious or wrong for some reason I've forgotten, the first player who came to mind was Dave Douglas. I think he'd pick right up on Hill's stuff, if he hasn't already, and would bring a lot of perky, quirky drive to the proceedings.

Some under-the-radar Kamuca worth checking out is on Shelly Manne's album of music from the TV show "Checkmate" (originally on Contemporary, now on OJC). It dates from Oct. 1961, by which time Kamuca had been trying to assimilate as much Rollins and Trane as his third-generation Pres approach could handle, and it seems to me that here he's got it all together. The themes, by John Williams (yes that John Williams), are post "Kind of Blue" modal to some extent, and the player Kamuca had become by then just eats this material up. By contrast, his frontline partner, Conte Candoli, was then trying his damndest to sound like "KOB" Miles, and the mix between this impersonation and Conte's actual, brassy Diz-Sweets soul is a bit uneasy -- he tries so hard to wiggle himself into the "style" that at times he sounds like he's trying on a girdle. Russ Freeman is on piano (he too eats up the material), Chuck Berghofer is on bass. Concord-era Kamuca is a bit different -- wonderfully mellow, completely mature, and the album on alto captures Bird's spirit (the freedom and rhythmic fluidity) about as well as anyone this side of Dave Schildkraut.

Strange that there's been no mention (unless I've missed it) of Ben Webster or Johnny Hodges. Maybe there's too much to chose from, and the standard in both cases is so high. For Webster, how about "Have You met Miss Jones" with Tatum? For Hodges, maybe "Passion Flower"?

For one kind of thing, though it's hard to say exactly what that thing is -- actual soul-baring torment, a dramatized remembrance of same, or both -- Serge Chaloff's "Body and Soul" from "Boston Blow-Up" (it's on the Chaloff Mosaic set). The confusion (in my mind at least) arises because it's pretty clearly a set piece in some respects, particularly the coda, but the emotional story-telling seems very raw and in the moment. Whatever, I don't know of anything else like it.

My God, Jazzbo, where did that image of Christy at bat come from? It's a heartbreaker. The whole happy-sad American girl thing is right there.

What I remember about ECM's sound, at least in its mid- to late-1970s heyday, was that Eicher and his engineers made sticks on ride cymbals sound like knitting needles.

A great find for me in two ways -- because I came across it as a battered but playable LP, and because the gap between what I thought it would be like and what it turned out to be is vast -- is "Shelly Manne and His Men Play 'Checkmate'" (Contemporary), now available as an OJC CD. The reason I didn't expect much is that it's jazz versions of the score of the 1960-1 TV series "Checkmate," which starred Sebastian Cabot and Doug McClure, and the music is by Johnny Williams, the one-time jazz pianist who went under the name John Towner for a while (so as not to be confused with the other piano-playing John Williams, who worked with Stan Getz) and who eventually became John Williams, the composer of the music for "Star Wars" et al. But the tunes not only are OK, or are made OK by Manne and Co. (Conte Candoli, Richie Kamuca, Russ Freeman, Chuck Berghofer), most of them end up in a Miles-modal bag, which leads to some interesting results, especially from Kamuca and Freeman. There's some '58 material jam session material from Kamuca, issued on Fresh Sounds I think under Scott LaFaro's name, that shows him trying to add chunks of contemporary Rollins and Coltrane to his second-generation Lester Young soul, and it isn't happening at all. By late '61, though, he's in a beautiful place, less wispy and/or brittle than he used to be, warm, relaxed, lyrical, harmonically agile and rhythmically spot-on -- a really soulful, personal player. (His three Concord discs from the '70s -- "Drop Me Off in Harlem," "Richie," and "Richie Kamuca's Charlie" -- are excellent; the last, a Bird tribute on alto, captures the spirit as well as anyone this side of Dave Schildkraut.) Freeman on modal material is a gas -- in the face of the Bill Evans wave that swept over (maybe that should be "swept under") so many pianists of his generation and style, Freeman keeps his Powell-Silver articulation and doesn't get all soft and impressionistic -- while Candoli tries very hard to sound like Miles, though his peppy brassiness seems to be at war with this. All in all, a very interesting record, especially for Kamuca.

Don't play the trumpet, but I believe that Ruby Braff also played a lot of "off the horn" notes. In both cases (his and Fruscella's), it mostly sounds like it's just the note they need to continue the thought, but there also is a spooky chalumeau edge, as though an extra level of intimacy and/or mystery had been reached.

Further thoughts about Fruscella-related trumpeters: Definitely one of them, and perhaps among the progenitors of the style, was John Carisi. Of course better known as a composer-arranger, Carisi could really play, though examples aren't abundant. Best to my knowledge, and a fine showcase for his writing too, is the previously unissued 1956 date on 1988 RCA CD "The Arrangers," which includes new settings of "Israel" and "Lestorian Mode" and the first versions of "Springsville" and "Barry's Tune." As for Don Joseph, a must for his admirers is the reissue of Chuck Wayne's 1957 VIK album "String Fever" (on Fresh Sounds, I think, and, with valuable alternate takes, on Euphoria!). Joseph solos on more than half the tracks and is in particularly fine form on "Embraceable You" and "Lover Man." Nice quote from drummer Sonny Igoe in the Euphoria! liner notes: "[Don Joseph] became a legendary trumpet player, but he was only a legend on Staten Island!"

Bebop, when you say, "As a used-to-be tenor player, I think the man articulates like he's got a mouthful of marbles and it drives me nuts," I think you're pointing right at a big part of the problem. While there were times when Hank's control of the horn was not ideal (probably because he was under the weather physically or, in the case of the "Blackhawk" material, feeling a draft from Miles) what Bebop and probably many others hear as "mouthful of marbles" articulation is, in the view of Mobley admirers, entirely purposeful rhythmic ambiguity/subtlety, although its working aren't always that easy to grasp because so much is going on at the level of the smallest perceivable rhythmic units -- the musical equivalent of a wink or a shrug. All I'm saying is that Mobley is one of those players where you really have to hear every note to grasp what's going on, this compared to players like Dexter or Rollins, who so thoroughly dramatize the through line of their thinking that it's like their solos come with Cliff Notes (no value judgment here, BTW, just different ways of being).

"THAT's what you were dreaming about as a teenage boy?!?!?" Among other things.

I mentioned this once before (on the BN Board I think) and no one bit, so I'll try again. Has anyone ever dreamed (as in dreamed up) a Great Find? Once in my teens I dreamed I was in a large record store (probably Rose Records in downtown Chicago) flipping through the bins when I came across a disc that featured the unlikely frontline team of Jack Teagarden, Paul Desmond, and Cy Touff. This was the era of listening booths, so in the dream I actually listened to one track -- Teagarden stating the melody of "Stars Fell on Alabama" with his usual grace while an inspired Desmond fluttered around him like a butterfly. Don't recall what Cy's role was, if any; in fact, his utterly off-the-wall presence in the dream is part of what made it seem so real.

Trumpet Guy, listened to the Cohn-Sims "From A To Z" with Dick Sherman on the way into downtown Chicago yesterday morning, and he is without doubt one of the Fruscella, Joseph, Sunkel circle and definitely worth hearing, as is the entire album, which includes am intense, moody Ralph Burns ballad titled, yes, "Crimea River." Sherman, who's on 10 0f 16 tracks, shows his colors on the first track by quoting from "Venus De Milo" and sounds very confident throughout in fast company. The vaunted Jazz Record Mart had the Fruscella-Getz material you mentioned -- Fru and Getz from Birdland in 1955, "Pernod" and other tunes -- and you're right, it's superb, many thanks. Unfortunately they didn't have your album. Also, Sherman does solo on"Elliot Lawrence Plays Gerry Mulligan Arrangements" (OJC).

Trumpet Guy, "Jazz From The 50's-Wave Cd-Midway Lounge" is the additional material from the Pittsburgh engagment that "The Real Lee Konitz" was drawn from. As you probably know, Ferrara's solos on"The Real Lee Konitz" for reasons Lee explains in the liner notes, were edited out of most the performances on "The Real Lee" -- in fact, if memory serves, there isn't a single solo by Ferrara left there. As for "Jazz From the '50s," again if memory serves, all the performances on that disc are different from the ones on the "The Real Lee" rather than being, in some cases, "Real Lee" takes with Ferrara's edited-out choruses restored.

Trumpet Guy, this is from a 2001 post on rec.music.bluenote by Ron Hearn: "There is a great article on Don in the June, 2000 issue of Jazz Journal. Don lives in California, just north of San Diego. He teaches his students via cassette." All I have of "Very Cool" is the old LP. I've been hoping for a Mosaic Complete Lee Konitz on Verve set some day, but I guess I should spring for the "Very Cool" CD -- an import I assume? It was a nice surprise when Peter Ind put out more material from "The Real Lee Konitz" engagement with Ferrara. Don't know of the Getz/Fru jam session 54, just the few tracks they recorded for Clef or Verve, about half an LP.

Trumpet Guy, if you feel that way about Fruscella and Joseph, I've got to check out your own stuff. Don't know much about Dick Sherman, except that he's on 10 tracks of the 1957 RCA Al Cohn-Zoot Sims album "From A to Z." Can't find it right now for some damn reason, but I believe he's also on "Elliott Lawrence Plays Gerry Mulligan Arrangments" (OJC) from the same period and solos on at least one track. He definitely was one of those guys, though based on what I've heard not at the level Fruscella and Joseph reached -- mellow, soulful, and, perhaps like all them, a bit saxophonish in conception, a la Lester Young. Ferrara was maybe the most extreme in trying to bring to the trumpet a conception from another instrument -- the piano as played by Tristano (or so it seems to me) -- but then Tristano's conception, or a big part of it, came from Pres too.

Excellent album, wonderful player. Fruscella was part of a loose-knit school of coolish East Coast trumpet lyricists, sort of bebop by way of Bobby Hackett guys. Among the others were the remarkable Don Joseph (if you can, find his fine Uptown LP with Al Cohn and check out his unearthly solo on Mulligan's big band recording of "All The Things You Are" on the Columbia album "The Arranger"), Tristano student Don Ferrara, Dick Sherman (who crops up on the Al Cohn-Zoot Sims album "From A To Z"), and Phil Sunkel. Jon Eardley might be belong with this crowd, too. There may be others that I'm forgetting. All these players had veiled, mellow tones, as though they were playing through felt beanies or were using cornets. Joseph, in fact, was a cornetist.

Chuck -- I'm probably the source of this, because when it dawned on me a few years back that the alternate and original takes of "Crutch" sounded identical throughout, both head and solos -- which suggested either that they were the same take mistakenly repeated or that there were two different takes but that Twardzik's solo was all worked-out beforehand (like a stride piece) -- I sent an e-mail about this to Cuscuna and got the following reply, which I forwarded to you: "I'm sure Twardzik didn't reproduce a solo note for note. This must have been a mistake or confusion from tape boxes or discographies that I repeated. Unfortunately, I have no notes or memory of this." The above refers to the American issue, though. Could it be that the TOJC, which I don't have, includes a legitimate alternate take of "Crab"? Or does it repeat the duplication of takes?

Mule, thanks for finding and citing the passage I somewhat mis-remembered. The way it actually is strikes me as underlining Gavin's lack of expertise and his eagerness to sound like an insider even more than I'd thought was the case. That is, if you don't know who Serge Chaloff is, as Gavin apparently doesn't, don't describe him as "rising young saxophonist." That's not a tag for circa 1951 Chaloff that anyone who knows who he is would apply, and my guess is that Gavin came up with the phrase on his own hook because he wanted to sound like someone who was in the know and assumed that that a musician who was shooting up with Twardzik probably was one of his young running buddies. Again, nothing fatally wrong with not being in the know here; everybody's got to start someplace -- but just be aware when you aren't in the know, takes reasonable steps to correct that, and don't pretend. As for Gavin's approach to Baker being filtered through Bruce Weber's "Let's Get Lost" and how Weber's own character and his work in general are seen through the lens of the "outing is good, concealment is bad" side of gay politics, again I don't have the book in front of me, but (1) I recall that Gavin says in the book, or has said elsewhere, that his interest in Baker essentially began when he saw Weber's film (2) Gavin spends a lot of time on Baker's physically and emotionally andrognynous aura (a la that of James Dean) and how it has had a potently romantic effect on young people who are at sea about their sexual identities (3) the passage in the book where Gavin discusses the way Weber allegedly mistreated the young woman (don't recall her name) who played a major role in the making of "Let's Get Lost" seemed to me to be the most emotionally intense piece of writing in "Deep In A Dream" by a good margain -- a virtual demonization of Weber and act of identification with his supposed victim -- which struck me as odd until I learned that (4) Gavin is something of a gay activist along "outing is good, concealment is bad" lines and that Weber's previously mentioned stance as a photographer whose work arguably has a homoerotic tone but who denies that and says that he himself is not gay is regarded by many such activists as a cause celebre. Now (2) is certainly a topic that belongs in a book about Chet Baker; the question is one of tone and emphasis, and we can disagree about whether Gavin goes overboard here. As for (3) and (4), while I wouldn't be surprised if Bruce Weber were, in fact, a total jerk, am I the only one who found that the passage in "Deep In A Dream" about Weber and that young woman who worked on "Let's Get Lost" stuck out like a sore thumb?

Don't have the book at hand, but based on my reading of "Deep In A Dream," just about everything in that book needs to be taken with many grains of salt. While James Gavin certainly talked to a lot of the right people, it seems to me that his angle of approach is not that of a jazz person but of someone who came to Baker primarily through fashion photographer Bruce Weber's film about Baker, "Let's Get Lost," and who seems to have as much or more emotion invested in the figure of Weber as he does in Baker (this, it seems, having to do with a strain in contemporary gay politics -- Gavin believing that Weber, photog for the Calvin Klein underwear ads and the like, is a very bad guy because his entire body of work is homoerotic in content, even though Weber insists that he isn't gay). About Gavin not being a jazz person, I don't mean that you need to be steeped in the music to write such a book, but you need to know what you don't know, need not to adopt an "insider" tone when you can't back it up. I remember one odd, seemingly minor but I think telling instance in "Deep In a Dream" that stopped me in my tracks, and it involved Twardzik. Introducing him, Gavin says something about the 20-year-old Twardzik playing sessions in the Boston area in 1951 with Serge Chaloff -- the wording of the passage implying that Twardzik and Chaloff were two young pals on the much the same plane in the jazz world, when in fact Twardzik (a student of Chaloff's mother) was just getting started and Chaloff was a much-recorded, poll-winning player who had returned to the Boston area because of drug-related health problems. I don't think the passage could have been written by anyone who actually knew who Serge Chaloff was, and a similar lack of background, and/or unwillingness to acknowlege that lack of background and take steps to make up for it, handicaps Gavin when it comes time to assess all the various stories he's told by all the various figures who ran across Baker in the course of his turbulent life.

About Twardzik's "A Crutch For The Crab" referring to Carl Perkins, if you're going only on the crab-like way Perkins used his left hand, that seems thin evidence to me, especially when the title gives me the feeling that the "Crab" was someone Twardzik knew (if it was not the supposedly high-strung Twardzik's own nickname), and I don't think it's likely that the Boston-based Twardzik and the L.A.-based Perkins ever crossed paths. It's not impossible that they did, but I'd want some testimony. I assume we know or can guess what the "A Crutch For" part of the title refers to and/or plays off of.

I like the term "micrometrically." Here are the at times too fancy liner notes I wrote for the 1982 LP reissue of Mobley's '57 album "Poppin.'" The bit about Nietzsche commenting on Mobley’s style was one of the too fancy parts. While Nietzsche did say those things, in his essay "Contra-Wagner," he was referring to the music of Georges Bizet. Also, I'd like to take back some of the semi-snotty remarks below about Art Farmer and Pepper Adams. You're only young once. Finally, Dexter Gordon on Mobley: "Ah, yes, the Hankenstein -- he was s-o-o-o-o-o hip." The Notes: In the mid-1950s the Blue Note label yielded momentarily to supersalesmanship, releasing such albums as The Amazing Bud Powell, The Magnificent Thad Jones, and The Incredible Jimmy Smith. That trend was dormant by the time Hank Mobley became a Blue Note regular and unfortunately so--a record titled The Enigmatic Hank Mobley would have been a natural. "To speak darkly, hence in riddles" is the root meaning of the Greek word from which "enigma" derives; and no player, with the possible exception of pianist Elmo Hope, has created a more melancholically quizzical musical universe than Mobley, one in which tab A is calmly inserted in slot D. Though he was influenced by Sonny Stitt and, perhaps, Lucky Thompson, Mobley has proceeded down his own path with a rare singlemindedness, relatively untouched by the stylistic upheavals that marked the work of his major contemporaries, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. In the words of Friederich Nietzsche, not previously known for his interest in jazz, Mobley’s music is "without grimaces, without counterfeit, without the lie of the great style. It treats the listener as intelligent, as if he himself were a musician. I actually bury my ears under this music to hear its causes." And that is the enigma of Mobley’s art: In order to hear its causes, the listener must bury his ears under it. In a typical Mobley solo there is no drama external to the developing line and very little sense of "profile" the quality that enables one to "read" a musical discourse as it unfolds. Not that high-profile players--Rollins and Dexter Gordon, for example--are unsubtle. But to understand Mobley the listener does have to come to terms with complexities that seem designed to resist resolution. First there is his tone. Always a bit lighter than that of most tenormen who worked in hard bop contexts, it was, when this album was made, a sound of feline obliqueness--as soft, at times, as Stan Getz’s but blue-gray, like a perpetually impending rain cloud. Or to put it another way, Mobley, in his choice of timbres, resembles a visual artist who makes use of chalk or watercolor to create designs that cry out for an etching tool. Harmonically and rhythmically, he could also seem at odds with himself. For proof that Mobley has a superb ear, one need listen only to his solo here on "Tune Up." The apparently simple but tricky changes pretty much defeat Art Farmer and Pepper Adams; but Mobley glides through them easily, creating a line that breathes when he wants it to, not when the harmonic pattern says "stop." And yet no matter how novel his harmonic choices were--at this time he surely was as adventurous as Coltrane--Mobley’s music lacks the experimental fervor that would lead Coltrane into modality and beyond. Mobley’s decisions were always ad hoc; and from solo to solo, or even within a chorus, he could shift from the daring to the sober. What will serve at the moment is the hallmark of his style; and thus, though he is always himself, he has, in the normal sense hardly any style at all. Even more paradoxical is Mobley’s sense of rhythm. His melodies float across bar lines with a freedom that recalls Lester Young and Charlie Parker; and he accents on weak beats so often (creating the effect known in verse as the "feminine ending") that his solos seem at first to have been devised so as to baffle even their maker. Of course, that’s not the case, but even though he has all the skills of a great improviser, Mobley simply refuses to perform the final act of integration; he will not sum up his harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral virtues and allow any one element to dominate for long. In that sense he is literally a pioneer, a man whose innate restlessness never permits him to plant a flag and say "here I stand." Thus, to speak of a mature or immature Hank Mobley would be inappropriate. Once certain technical problems were worked out--say, by 1955--he was capable of producing striking music on any given day. New depths were discovered in the 1960s and the triumphs came more frequently; but in late 1957, when Poppin’ was recorded, he was as likely as ever to be on form. Much depended on his surroundings, and the band he works with here has some special virtues. The rhythm section is one of the great hard-bop trios, possessing secrets of swing that now seem beyond recall. Philly Joe Jones and Paul Chambers, partners, of course, in the Miles Davis Quintet, shared a unique conception 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. As a leavening element there was Sonny Clark, equally intense, but more generous and forgiving in his patterns of accompaniment. He leads the soloists with a grace that recalls Count Basie; and his own lines, with their heartbreakingly pure lyricism, make him the hard bop equivalent of Duke Jordan. The ensemble sound of the band, a relatively uncommon collection of timbres heard elsewhere on Coltrane’s and Johnny Griffin’s first dates under their own names, gives the album a distinctive, ominous flavor; but this is essentially a blowing date. Art Farmer, for my taste, never played as well as he did during this period, perhaps because the hard bop style was at war with his deadening sense of neatness. Possessing a musical mind of dandaical suavity coupled with the soul of a librarian, Farmer usually sounded too nice to be true. But this rhythm section puts an edge on his style (as it did a few months later on Clark’s Cool Struttin’), and I know of no more satisfying Farmer solo than the one preserved here on "Getting Into Something," where he teases motifs with a wit that almost turns nasty. Adams’ problem has always been how to give his lines some sense of overall design, and too often the weight of his huge tone hurtles him forward faster than he can think. But when the changes and the tempo lie right for him, Adams can put it all together; and here he does so twice, finding a stomping groove on "Getting Into Something" and bringing off an ex-hilarating doubletime passage on "East of Brooklyn." As for the leader, rather than describing each of his solos, it might be useful to focus first on a small unit and then on a larger one. On the title track, Mobley’s second eight-bar exchange with Jones is one of the tenorman’s perfect microcosms and an example of how prodigal his inventiveness could be. A remark-able series of ideas, mostly rhythmic ones, are produced (one might almost say squandered) in approximately nine seconds. Both the relation of his accented notes to the beat and the overall pattern they form are dazzlingly oblique; and the final whiplike descent is typically paradoxical, the tone becoming softer and more dusty as the rhythmic content increases in urgency. In effect we are hearing a soloist and a rhythm player exchange roles, as Mobley turns his tenor saxophone into a drum. On "East of Brooklyn" Mobley gives us one of his macrocosms, a masterpiece of lyrical construction that stands along-side the solo he played on "Nica’s Dream" with the Jazz Messengers in 1956. "East of Brooklyn" is a Latin-tinged variant on "Softly As in a Morning Sunrise," supported by Clark’s "Night in Tunisia" vamp. Mobley’s solo is a single, sweeping gesture, with each chorus linked surely to the next as though, with his final goal in view, he can proceed toward it in large, steady strides. And yet even here, as Mobley moves into a realm of freedom any musician would envy, one can feel the pressure of fate at his heels, the pathos of solved problems, and the force that compels him to abandon this newly cleared ground. In other words, to "appreciate" Hank Mobley, to look at him from a fixed position, is an impossible task. He makes sense only when one is prepared to move with him, when one learns to share his restlessness and feel its necessity. Or, as composer Stefan Wolpe once said, "Don’t get backed too much into a reality that has fashioned your senses with too many realistic claims. When art promises you this sort of reliability, drop it. It is good to know how not to know how much one is knowing."