Larry Kart

Maybe it's just me or the sound quality of these clips, but while I've heard and enjoyed a good deal of live Ella, her voice here sounds rather harsh, forced, and blaring to me.

Barron's ability to give a subtly different weight to each note in a multi-note line is something else. Yes, it's a tribute album (to Lee Morgan), but the choice of pieces is shrewd, and the band is hot and really together.

Yesterday by way of Tommy's Jazz I got my order of ten Reservoir CDs. Initial thoughts as I sample along: John Hicks' trio album "Beyond Expectations" (with Ray Drummond and Smitty Smith) is solid gold. I coiuld kick myself for not delving into Hicks' work under his own name before, much as I've liked him as a sideman. He was a superb, quite individual player. Nick Brignola's "All Business," with Dave Pike, guitarist Chuck D'Aloia, John Pattitucci, and Billy Hart. Nick's up tempo take on "Pent-Up House," a virtual duet with Hart, is something else -- rip-roaring, as one might expect from Brignola, but SO coherent that it's almost a composition in itself. Excellent Jim Anderson sound. Moving on.

It's on the way to me.

Thanks, Jim and Dave.

Many thanks to Jim Sangrey for recommending this fine album (see below), which has the best latter-day Bill Perkins I know; on this one at least it all came together for him. My guess is that the springy somewhat reminiscent of early Gary Peacock bass playing of Chris Colangelo had a good deal to with this. Anyone know when this album was recorded?

My wife missed getting the license plate. The next time, if there is one, she won't. BTW the official motto of our town -- Highland Park, il. -- is "courtesy counts."

A week or so ago my 62-year-old wife was walking the dog on the sidewalk when a kid aged 12-14, on a bike came barreling up from behind with no warning and almost knocked her down. She yelled at him that he should be riding on the street (that's the law here) or at least shout in warning "on your left"or "on your right" or walk his bike when approaching a pedestrian from behind at high speed. He did yell "sorry" as he rode away. So today she was walking the dog again when a woman in a white Cadiliac SUV pulled up alongside her and began yelling at her for yelling at her kid that day -- the kid was in the SUV's front seat, which is how the mom knew my wife was the "culprit" who dared to admonish her offspring. My wife replied that her son should be riding his bike in the street, per the traffic laws, not mowing down pedestrians from behind; the mom replied that the streets here are too narrow for that, which is b.s. Then the mom angrily gunned the SUV's engine several times, seemingly to express how furious she was, and drove off.

Ira, Johnny Griffin, and bassist Nevin Wilson are on the cover of my book: The uncredited photo was taken from almost exactly where I was sitting that Monday night at the Gate of Horn, though it may have been taken at another club. Couldn't believe my good fortune when I found it in the Chicago Tribune "morgue," from whence I borrowed it. BTW, when Ira came back to Chicago to play at Joe Segal's Jazz Showcase in 1967 IIRC after a long stay in Miami, I did an interview with him for the Tribune. He couldn't have been nicer or more real. My favorite Ira tenor solo -- with Red Rodney, Tommy Flanagan, Oscar Pettiford, and Philly Joe Jones in 1957. The transition Ira makes from the Latin-portion into straight time!

B&W 800 speakers Marantz SC-11SI amp Marantz SA-15S2 CD player Rega PS2 turntable Audio Technica VM740ML cartridge Sennheiser 655 headphones Schitt Magni heaphone amp cables whose names I don't recall Tripp-Lite power conditioner Onkyo TA-RW255 cassette deck

Have never forgot some sequence photos of Sayers in maybe his first or second year versus the Lions. He'd broken through the line a bit and was faced by two Lion linebackers -- Joe Schmidt and another guy, one facing Sayers directly maybe two feet away from him, the other also close up and a step or two to Sayers' right. In the next photo in the series Sayers was several steps to the left of the two Lions (i.e. he'd moved sideways) while the two Lions were still rooted in their former spots, after which Sayers turned upfield. If a guy can move sideways that fast and that smoothly... He was a joy to watch. Then there was the day he scored six or seven TDs against the 49ers on a muddy field, all of them needed for the win -- the last one on a kickoff return where he scored untouched.

I'll never forget hearing him when I was a freshman in high school in 1956 or '57 at a Monday night session (Monday was a no drinks sold off night so young people could get in) at the Gate of Horn with Johnny Griffin, Jodie Christian, Donald Garrett, and Wilbur Campbell. They played "Night in Tunisia" and after Ira and Griffin soloed, Ira picked up his tenor and he and Griffin had a friendly tenor battle.

Further Berwald report: I got the Dausgaard, and while I like his foregrounding of the winds; heard alongside Kamu (whose virtues shine by comparison) he's too (rather self-consciously) delicate, even a bit persnickety in his phrasing. Most troublesome is the very broad dynamic range of the recording (originally on Chandos); I have the Brilliant Clasic reissue). Adjust your (at least my) volume control so as to clearly make out the more delicate passages and you'll be blasted elsewhere. OTOH, a comparative listen to Dausgaard and Kamu did make me hone in on the virtues off the latter. You listen and learn.

"Black Beauty" (dedicated to the late Florence Mills) -- the solemn tap dancing here is elegiac, even funeral, no? Also... "What Am I Here For?" And "The Sergeant Was Shy" -- though it's not a song at all but a fullblown composition, like "Ko Ko."

Thanks. I used to have many copies, maybe 40 or so, that the Jazz Record Mart bought as remainders and then sold at a modest price -- they used to do that a lot with jazz books -- but my copies are gone now, given away to people whom I thought would like the book. I'm sure it still can be found used at Amazon and in some of your "better" libraries.

The reason I had the suspicions I did was that Stanley was in such an impetus high gear from the first, spewing out what he did about Lester, that I felt he might be used to more or less rolling over people when he was in that groove, which seems to have been fairly common for him. Further, it seemed to me that in this wild rush of words he didn't need my agreement but merely my silence, which he then could either interpret or reshape as agreement. P.S. about that impetuous high gear groove, it just occurred to me what might have been at the root of it -- Stanley was simply nervous, anxious perhaps that I might try to cite chapter and verse as to why his ugly put down of Lester was mistaken, even stupid. That didn't occur to me until now because the idea of me/my opinions making anyone feel nervous seems absurd to me. But if Stanley was that committed to being the or a top dog in the realm, I was after all a published critic whose track record on this and that probably was known to him. I should add that if one is a longtime (some 60 years now) friend, as I am, of Chuck Nessa and Terry Martin, and even relatively gentle John Litweiier, one gets quite used to encountering rock-solid opinions from them that would and should daunt anyone, unless one already happens to agree with them. A long rich education, it's been. And Sangrey is coming up hard on the far turn.

My two personal encounters with Crouch. 1) back in the mid-1980s, when I was at the Chicago Tribune, Stanley was a guest at a Lake Forest, Ill. writers colony, the Ragdale Foundation, working on his novel perhaps. We'd never met but one day he called me up at work to chat. In short order, no doubt knowing of my fondness for the AACM circle of musicians, he began to go off on Lester Bowie as a fraud -- this because among other things (and I think he'd written about this previously) when Lester played "Well You Needn't" he played, as many people did, the simplified bridge that Miles popularized rather than the more complex one that Monk wrote. I began to suspect that Stanley was telling me this with little or no prelude and in a great gush of enthusiasm because either he thought I might flat out agree with him that Lester was a fraud or that if I didn't contradict him, he could think that I agreed with him even if I didn't say so and then perhaps tell someone else that I did. So I told him right off that I thought Lester was a master musician, and added a few details. Stanley hung up the phone without another word, didn't even try to argue with me. And I wasn't being hostile about it. 2) Several years later, I was in NYC to hear the first concert of the Basie Band under Thad Jones' new leadership, after which I was supposed to interview Thad. The night turned into a long goofy odyssey that didn't end until maybe 6:30 a.m. (I may write about it sometime), and at one point our group (Thad, myself, a young Turkish student of Thad's, Tommy Flanagan, and his wife) headed over at Thad's urging to the Vanguard to hear Kenny Burrell on his opening night. Kenny finishes his set, spots Thad and with a smile on his face heads across the room to greet him. But halfway there, he's intercepted by Stanley, who leaps up from a table, wraps Kenny in a bear hug and proceeds to shower praise on him in a voice that is loud enough to be heard by much of the room, which may have been the point, this while Kenny is looking at Thad with a rather sheepish "what the hell is going on here?" expression on his face.

Zacharias!

Interesting jam session material, with pluses (Cole, Jacquet -- both in warmly inventive modes, and Jacquet here not into honking and screaming) and minuses (Jack McVea, with his penchant for whistled-out high notes). Particularly choice is a long exchange between Cole and Les Paul, where each man tries to amuse or even baffle the other with figures that were "far out" at the time -- the pattern being that Paul leads things off and Cole imitates and modifies in in a more musical, less tricky direction what Paul has proposed. It's certainly fun for the audience, and one feels that Paul and Cole were having fun too.

Oops. I got on the wrong ferry. But the rest of what I said still goes, no?

Wasn't Denmark Berwald's home country and wasn't it Denmark's musical culture within which he frustratingly tried to function? In particular, if your gift is for symphonic music, and you can't get a hearing for that music in your home country, such that you have to retreat to running a sawmill in an attempt to make a living, Denmark in the 1840s would seem to have something to do with it. Also, in that era, countries and even fairly musically sophisticated cities like Leipzig, where IIRC Berwald's music did get a hearing, seemed to be culturally far more isolated than would be the case later on. IIRC. Favoring the home-grown was a common theme, and Berwald was an outsider several times over. Milieu matters, no? Imagine Roscoe Mitchell with all his extravagant gifts growing up in a city that lacked Chicago's rich, yeasty jazz heritage, a city with no Muhal, no AACM, none or few of Roscoe's eventual musical partners., and, for that matter, no Chuck Nessa at Delmark with the ears to hear what Roscoe could do and thus no "Sound." Also a city that was, like Copenhagen in the 1840s, not particularly linked in terms of what was going on in terms of musical culture with other cities in the world. If that had been the milieu, where might Roscoe be today? Back to the mid-19th Century, was it incidental to their eventual impact that Liszt was a much traveled sexy/semi-scandalous virtuoso and one-man font of publicity and Berlioz was doing his best to tear up the pea-patch in Paris, the virtual capital of the 19th Century. And even then, the disparity between what Berlioz wanted to do musically and what opportunities Paris of that era was able to/chose to offer him almost drove him out of his cotton-picking mind.

I've got and like both Kamu-Berwald discs, though I recall that the old Ehrling was a bit better -- but in rather dim early '60s LP sound IIRC. Yesterday I ordered the Dausgaard set, cheap now on Brilliant Classics (two CDs for about $9). Some said it was very good, though some said it lacked punch. I don't think of Berwald as a very "punchy" composer though. We shall see. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that Berwald is not an easy composer to get just right, and when he isn't gotten just right or close to just right, some find him to be mererlty workmanlike, with a quirk or two, That particular swatch of time -- 1840s-'50s -- was pretty unsettled in Euorpean music in general, and Berwald's position in Denmark seems to have been especially equivocal for reasons that seem to have been related to that country's then rather provincial musical culture. For instance, Berwald's forte seems to have been orchestral/symphonic music, but Denmark had no taste for that sort of music at that time; opera was what was wanted there, and IIRC his major orchestral scores got no hearing win Denmark at the time. Also, not being able to make a go of it financially as a composer, Berwald got involved In running a lumber mill IIRC. When Liszt eventually heard Berwald's music, he was enthusiastic about its harmonic and formal subtleties, which in retrospect seem dead on.

More from Kase: https://youtu.be/3ja1RwX8XAo

It was the title track of "On the Tender Spot" that inspired my 'vat of chicken fat" remark. For note bending/melding that that has a story-telling, much more than decorative effect, try my man Chris Kase. Go to his "Teaser" on YouTube; he solos toward the end of the track. There are even more striking examples of what he can do, but for some darn reasonI can't track them down right now. Chris has been teaching in Madrid for many years.

I have nothing against note smearing/note bending per se, but the way Akinmusire does this makes me feel like I'm drowning in a vat of chicken fat.