Larry Kart

Whoever recommended this one, I think it was Jim, many thanksl Whew! As John Litweiler once wrote, "I haven't had so much fun since the pigs ate my little sister."

The discogprahy link says that it came "following a period of despair ." Very sorry to hear that. Any details?

Very familiar with Hayes thanks to two Proper Boxes and other individual albums, and have a basically very positive impression of Tubbs, though his fairly uniform high energy level can get a bit wearing. Of Scott I only have a Proper box of early material, which was not terribly promising -- warm, generic, not that individual playing, but again it was early stuff. My most recent batch of Hayes material includes two Jazz Couriers albums, and here Scott has come into his own. Typically his lines are a fair bit longer. than Tubbs' -- preferences in that respect are a matter of taste, though I admire Scott's seemingly hard-won development there (he wants to look as far down the road as he can); at times he somewhat reminds me of vintage Harold Land. I I need to hear more Scott, wonder how and if he develops further (any recommendations?) I know how Tubbs' future goes until the very end.

Out of left field -- Terry Gibbs. Should probably exclude all of his LA Crescendo big band albums -- if you like those, you have them -- plus his recent Concord stuff. But there's one NYC big band album from the late '50s on Emarcy plus a good many quartet albums, one on Impulse with Kenny Burrell, a fair number more (on Emarcy IIRC) with the semi-forgotten but excellent Detroit pianist Terry Pollard and others with Alice Mcleod on piano (later Alice Coltrane). And let's throw in Pollard's Emarcy trio album for good measure. Thinking of how Gibbs found all those tapes of his Crescendo band on a closet shelf, I wouldn't be surprised if he has some unissued tapes lying around of his '50s quartet with Pollard. There's also that Mode album with Gibbs, Larry Bunker, and Victor Feldman, all on vibes. Sounds gimmicky, but it's not.

Again -- if you like Moody, what Moody wouldn't you have? That French 10-inch album with Andre Hodeir arrangements?

I thought of Richie K. but had to say no. Not enough under his own name, and too much is/has been available in piecemeal fashion. Much the same for his running mate Bill Perkins. Also, those of us who like those guys have been collecting their stuff for a good while.

Just to be silly, I''ll add a few names that IMO don't make the grade for fairly obvious reasons -- Conte Candoli (very good but not great), Stu Williamson (not that good IMO even annoying), Herb Geller (good on a good day, but how many of those days were there?) Dave Schildkraut (to satisfy Allen Lowe), Micky Tucker (to satisfy me -- but then I think I have about all the MT there is), Jack Montrose (you gotta be kidding), JR Monterose (I'd go for that in a minute if more stuff could be found), -- I could go on, but that might call for an intervention. Duke Jordan is almost a god to me, but too much is too similar and is/has been readily available

Bryant? Fine man in a section, much respected, big rich sound, but IMO not a tremendously distinctive solo voice. I'd compare him to, say, Benny Bailey, who I don't think quite meets the Mosaic standard either, though he might have if he'd gotten a good deal more chances on record to show what he could do. There's the Candid that Nat Hentoff set up for him and two nice British label albums with Tony Coe, one with each of them as leader. Anything else? In terms of quality and amount of material, I think of Fathead Newman, but most of that material is/has been readily available. Lucky Thompson's name comes up often, and he's a major player, but I've managed to acquire just about all the LT I'm aware of, and I'd bet that other LT fans have too. In my book, Al Haig and Jimmy Raney are major figures, but in both cases, is there much that hasn't been available in recent times?

I bought True Blue when it came out way back when, and without any urging fron Cuscuna or anyone else I dreamt of hearing more Brooks. I'm sure I wasn't the only one.

Sorry -- my error. Born in Buffalo, had been living in Canada. Take your pick as to what that makes him. I assume he lived near to where the gigs were.

Born in Rochester N.Y.

Damn good trumpet player.

For some galvanic early Morel got to You Tube for "Everybody Stomp Morel" and "Charquet & Co Jungle Jamboree" (an entire album). For Morel's orchestra go to on You Tube "Les Rois du Foxtrot - 2010 Whitley Bay International Jazz Festival." On CD I'd recommend "TNT: a Tribute to Elmer Schoebel but all their albums are very good.

A nice Dallwitz piece is "Clarinet Sugar." You can find it on You Tube. Also go to You Tube for "Billabong Bob Barnard" another Dallwitz gem.

I said "somewhat." Morel's orchestra actually plays the compositions and arrangements of U.S. writers of the '20s. The results sound great and fresh, not revivalist in the restrictive/constricting sense.

She's a GOOD one.

Two great sources for somewhat revivalist jazz that's terrific are foreign -- the Australian stuff that originated in the 1940s by the late Dave Dallwitz, the Bell Brothers (Roger and Grahame) Ade Monsborough et al. and the more recent French stuff from Jean Pierre Morel and his Le Petit Jazz Band and its orchestral offshoot. Different as they are, these guys get it right -- nothing is within quotation marks. Dallwitz in particular is a composer in the Morton class. Morel's stuff is or used to be available via the Stomp Off label. As Terry Martin (himself an Australian who grew up around Dallwitz in Adelaide) shrewdly pointed out in the Oxford Companion to Jazz, one key reason thus stuff works so well is what might be called the "so near, so far" principle, in terms of time and geography. Distance in those realms tends to preclude futile Turk Murphy attempts at outright emulation and leaves room for fruitful personal engagement of sensibilities. One Dallwitz album to go for first is his masterpiece, the "Ern Malley Suite." "Gold Rush Days" and "Gulgong Shuffle" are also choice. "Ern Malley Suite" seems to be on You Tube. Maybe more Dallwitz too. He also was a gifted painter.

Yes, Shorty's writing for big band especially is rather straightforward, in the vein of Herman's Second Herd, but I find it to be more less organic/coherent and reasonably varied within that bag. He does like to make perhaps excessive use of the virtuoso trumpet sections he had available to him at RCA, but I find some of that stuff to be fairly exciting, which was the point. IIRC, at least one critic slammed "Shorty Courts the Count" for taking vintage Basie pieces and just upping the the pitch (say, by an octave) and volume of the trumpet parts -- again in the apparent aim of excitement -- but that critic felt that this distorted the coherence of the original pieces. I can see this both ways -- I register the distortion, which can border on hysteria, but feel. the excitement nonetheless. One could argue that NYC in 1938 and Los Angeles in 1958 were two different places of two different sensibilities. Also, FWIW, the Basie trumpets of '38 couldn't have played the charts that Shorty wrote for "Shorty Courts the Coun.t"

I like Shorty's own playing well enough -- FWIW Igor Stravinsky did too -- and I liked Shank back then. But as you probably know, Shank in his later days tried to turn himself into a "hot" player, more or less in the vein of Phil Woods. Yes, if Shank felt that way, he had every right, but I found the results to be ugly and emotionally dubious, i.e. I didn't believe a note of the new Shank.

Don't think I listened to or bought any Rogers until many years later in a Lighthouse ALL-Stars framework IIRC. Didn't care for all the people he hooked up with then -- if one of them was the latter-day "hot" Bud Shank, yuck! -- but it was nice to hear Shorty on his horn again and in very good shape. No, or nor much, new writing from him sadly. P.S. I know that Shank is no longer with us, which is sad to say, but I call 'em as I see 'em.

Nope on Afro Cuban Influence or The Fourth Dimension in Sound.

Think I reviewed that one for DB back in the day. Four stars IIRC.

By "short" I meant shorter than one might normally expect - say 8 or 16 bars, not a full chorus. But that brevity seems to fit the context.

I was there too. Did an interview with Chick for Down Beat. He seemed to have calmed down by that time. He tried to come on to my wife; told her she was an "old soul." Clearly it was a line that had worked for him before, but she was just amused.

"Shorty Rogers Plays Richard Rogers" -- another semi-forgotten RCA big band album from the '50s (1957). More solo space on this one than on "Chances Are" -- Herb Geller in exceptional form, along with Bill Perkins, Frank Rosolino, Rogers, Stan Levy (a quite energized accompanist), Pepper Adams et al. (Adams' solo on "Thou Swell" opens in hair-raising fashion; probably scared the album's other baritonist, Jimmy Giuffre, out of his wits.)