Jimmy Raney Featuring Bob Brookmeyer

[Larry Kart]

Guess it's horn-blowing time. Here's info about the book, "Jazz In Search of Itself" (Yale University Press):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030010420...glance&n=283155

Here's a link to an NPR radio review of the book from Kevin Whitehead (hope it still works):

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4242675

Here are some other reviews:

from All About Jazz:

Jazz in Search of Itself

Posted: 2005-01-18

By E.J. Iannelli

Larry Kart

Jazz in Search of Itself

Yale University Press

ISBN 0-30010-420-0

2004

”In every case,” writes Larry Kart in his preface to Jazz in Search of Itself , “the pieces collected here came to be written because other people asked for them.” Those mysterious “other people” include editors and higher-ups at the Chicago Tribune and Down Beat , but this shouldn't suggest that the impetus behind Kart's writing on jazz is solely one of money or obligation. The essays, interviews and reviews assembled in this book demonstrate his enduring love of the music and a fine critical ear for it.

Jazz in Search of Itself justifies its publication on the basis of the introduction alone. Here Kart describes in a nutshell the unique history of jazz and posits reasons for its personal and general appeal as well as its longevity. He is fascinated by what he calls in the two-page preface “this music's perpetual intimate narrative” in addition to its roots in self-expression, in support of which he cites Carl Dahlhaus' analysis that 'expressionist' composers - and by extension, jazz musicians - present to the public their “'intelligible I,' the analogue of the poet's 'lyric ego.'” This resolute belief in self-expression as one of the defining characteristics of jazz appears again and again in Kart's work, shaping his assessments of Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, Wynton Marsalis and pianist Bill Evans. It also partly explains the existential title.

Kart's tastes are broad, ranging from the downhome exuberance of Tin Pan Alley to the abstract philosophizing of Cecil Taylor. This eclecticism extends beyond music, too, enabling him to draw apposite comparisons between jazz music and, for example, the poetry of Tennyson, William Carlos Williams, Rimbaud and Pinsky, not to mention the philosophy of Ortega y Gassett and the fiction of Jack Kerouac (who has a piece devoted entirely to his own relation to jazz). These touchstones not only put the jazz under review into some kind of context for the non-musician or the newcomer; they also remind the reader that jazz is and always has been more than just music. It is a social and artistic phenomenon too.

One characteristic piece is the short sketch of tenor saxophonist Arnett Cobb from 1980. In the course of just 400 words or so, Kart nails one of those subtle delights that appear every so often in jazz music, this particular one being a two-note “ Yah -duh” that kicked off Cobb's solo on a rendition of ”Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” He writes: “Now I suppose you had to be there to hear what that ' Yah -duh did, but let me assure you that within its apparent simplicity there was more musical meaning than words could exhaust? And listening to it one could feel a literal loosening in the knees, an invitation to enter a realm of sensuous physicality.” This is the sort of event - and a written account to match - that makes one fall in love with jazz all over again. Similar onomatopoeic renderings of Ellington's “The Sergeant Was Shy” (the “Dee-doodle- doo ? dee-doodle- doo “ of the clarinets and the trumpets' “ boo -bop, boo-bop-boo-bop”) mix lightheartedness with a novelist's quest for descriptive accuracy.

Another noteworthy piece, written rather early in Kart's career in 1969, is the first one on Lee Konitz in the section on Tristano-ites, which despite its brevity is an especially rewarding section in Jazz in Search of Itself. “[O]ne senses that, more than any jazz musician of comparable skill, [Konitz] is often on the brink of surrendering to the impulse not to play - as though the blankness of the blank slate were so real to him that he 'writes' upon it with some reluctance.” Exquisitely put. One does not even need to have heard Konitz's music to appreciate this assessment; but for those who have its precision is remarkable. The same gift for metaphor can be found in the review of Ornette Coleman and his live performance with the band Prime Time, “the music of a man who has summoned up the gods for purposes of conversation, not worship.”

Of the fifty-odd biographical pieces, the opening ones on the relatively lesser-known Chicago players - tenor sax player Johnny Griffin, multi-instrumentalist Ira Sullivan and drummer Wilbur Campbell (the first two are pictured on the book cover) - are perhaps the most interesting. Kart has an affinity for the Chicago scene because he grew up there and experienced it firsthand; his special enthusiasm for these three musicians comes through in his writing. He's also helped by some witty quotes like the one that closes the Campbell interview: “Every drummer who's been playing can play anything he thinks of; the trouble is thinking of things to play. Lots of cats can play what they think, but they don't think it.” The reason for including some of the other pieces is less clear. The exceptionally short profile/review of Oscar Peterson from 1982, for instance, is as fervid as the pianist's playing, but in the company of the rest of these pieces it seems like an unnecessary footnote.

Over several decades of writing a critic runs the risk of repeating himself. One of Kart's causes celebres is advancing the idea that jazz is “our major native art form,” a phrase that crops up in several articles and introductions. Bebop is chained to the adjective “angular.” The notion that watching Philly Joe Jones perform is “like watching someone weave lace out of barbed wire” struck me as a clever turn of phrase. Unfortunately, Kart must have been equally fond of it because he used it again when describing Don Cherry in a piece dated two years later.

But these idiosyncrasies are not half as important and contentious as his generally low estimation of pianist Bill Evans. Kart recognizes the pastoral-free split in jazz, a profound ideological rift akin to that which developed between Stravinsky and Schoenberg several decades earlier in classical music, and one that could be best personified by Ornette Coleman leading the free camp and Evans (or better still, Miles Davis, the Stravinsky-type figure incorporating new methods into the traditional) leading the other. Full of praise for Coleman's flights of fancy, Kart instead zeroes in on Evans, calling him ”essentially a minor artist - a charming player, at best, but one whose music was confined to a rather narrow emotional realm whose possibilities he had largely exhausted by the early 1960s.” No other player, whether renowned or obscure, comes under as much fire in Jazz in Search of Itself. What Kart tries to understand and explain in this piece on Evans is how the pianist became so influential despite his “formulaic” playing and his taste for “sugary kitsch,” songs such as “What Kind of Fool Am I?” and “People”. When Evans took up these sentimental tunes “as though they were not sugary kitsch but songs that deserved all the tastefulness he could lavish upon them,” writes Kart, “he was as close to being emotionally fraudulent as the most cynical, manipulative cocktail lounge virtuoso.” And Kart must know this opinion rankles. He devotes a four-page apologia to it.

There is a Rat Pack recording on which Sammy Davis, Jr., that consummate entertainer, sings “What Kind of Fool Am I?” with a depth and feeling so genuine it hurts. Dodging good-natured chiding from Dean Martin between lines, a contrast that may even heighten the sense of authenticity, he sounds as if he's in a dark bedroom at 3am desperately trying to answer the rhetorical question of the song's title. If a jaded showbiz personality like Davis, Jr. can take up this ballad with such conviction, why should Evans be shamed for doing the same? There is, of course, no disputing the fact that in the hands of too many performers “What Kind of Fool Am I?” indeed becomes mawkish and false. But Evans, despite his arguable lack of stylistic bravado, transformed no small amount of kitsch into kunst precisely because he was in earnest when dealing with these romantic tunes. To my ear, he really was trying to find and articulate the answer to what kind of fool he was - emotional representation through technical means, the process of self-expression that Kart rates so highly elsewhere. So when Kart writes, “In jazz, it's not just the material but the artist's attitude toward it that counts,” in praise of Sonny Rollins' tongue-in- cheek treatment of sentimental tunes, it could be used to support either side of the case for or against Evans. Or is the attitude only acceptable when it's wry or sarcastic?

Before Evans can be accused of such artistic crimes as emotional fraudulence and cynical manipulation - and here it should be recognized that Kart has since taken all this into account and later amends his opinion accordingly - it is necessary to consider the man himself. One major clue - the key, even - lies in a quote that Kart provides in his apologia from Evans' longtime companion Peri Cousins. The unmitigated world, she says, one that hadn't been mediated with heroin or cocaine, was “too beautiful” for hypersensitive Evans to handle. “It's almost as if he had to blur the world for himself by being strung out.” And in one of the concluding interviews, two 1980s talks with Tony Bennett, the singer recalls a late-night phone call from the pianist with whom he recorded two commercially and artistically successful duo albums. “All he said was, 'Tony, just think love and beauty and forget all the rest.' ? It may sound like an impossible or unrealistic attitude to take in this world where there's so much cynicism, but there must have been a reason for him to tell me that.”

All my focus on Evans could be a moot point, politely brushed aside as my lashing out like a wounded animal because I happen to identify with something on a metaphysical level in much of his playing. But Evans, even during his darker years, is rarely just rooting around the bottom of the sentimentalist's bag of tricks; he is closing and opening the lid on the guarded chamber of one's soul.

The simple fact is that the “pastoral” is still capable of communicating and moving us in ways that the fractured, nebulous and occasionally overly cerebral avant and free styles cannot. This, I think, is why Evans chose to operate in this mode, and why I would claim that he had just as many hits and misses as his more consciously progressive counterparts. The evaluation Kart finally settles on, and one with which most will agree (albeit for slightly different reasons), is that “Evans was an artist whose conflicts threatened to overwhelm his gifts, and that it was his fate to spend much of the latter part of his career making a music in which those conflicts were disguised, even denied.”

It would also be hard to object to Kart's writing on the preservational museum vitrine treatment of jazz that began in the 1980s, a movement spearheaded by wunderkind and press darling Wynton Marsalis. This is a topic that jazz fans have debated until raw and bleeding, and it is covered here in the aptly titled section “The Neo-Con Game.” Writing in 1969 on “Jazz in the Global Village,” long before the revivalist issue had taken a definite course and shape, Kart is sympathetic to the artistic motivation but skeptical of the effect that too much reverence has on the development of European jazz. The next few essays, more or less chronological, see Kart placing himself firmly on the opposite side of Marsalis and the artistic neo-conservatives. This, yet again, is another strong section in this collection, of immense use to the jazz newcomer as well as the veteran who has already formed a firm opinion on the matter.

Jazz in Search of Itself touches on nearly all the major issues and figures to appear in jazz over the past fifty years and then some, spotlighting a few unexpected names along the way such as Frank Zappa and, as mentioned before, Jack Kerouac and Tony Bennett (on the matter of repertoire, Bennett memorably says, “I'd rather have a grocery store than a big supermarket”). As far as the towering personalities of jazz go, it is reassuring to see Kart's veneration of Stan Getz somewhat tempered later on in light of the saxophonist's infamous self-centeredness. (In a fairly recent television interview, the British pianist Stan Tracey said that Getz was the sort of man who washed his hands before he stood at the urinal, so highly did he think of that part of his anatomy.) Most importantly, however, Kart shares with other reputable critics the qualities of regular insight and contagious enthusiasm. His writing invariably sends readers to the music, whether for the first time or a repeat listen, with a better understanding and appreciation for it.

from paris transatlantic:

Larry Kart

JAZZ IN SEARCH OF ITSELF

Yale University Press

ISBN 0-30010-420-0 2004

I have to admit that reading the introduction to Larry Kart’s new anthology of jazz reviews, interviews and essays only added to the prior apprehension I had about the book, a mood induced by the title of the work. Certainly the ponderousness of the idea of a particular art subspecies looking hither and yon for itself wasn’t dampened by the introduction, with its opaque quotations from Ortega y Gasset and various proclamations to the effect that “jazz is a meaning-making activity; its acts ask to be read, and have even come to be at various times and places hungered for.” Thinking of my duty to read the tome, I once, calling upon Isiah Berlin, even issued a silent prayer. “Please,” I petitioned, “even if Kart is no hedgehog (knowing one big thing) let him at least be a fox (who knows many little—perhaps occasionally interesting things)!”

I needn’t have worried. Jazz in Search of Itself is not only interesting and fun to read, it’s perceptive, thoughtful, and evenhanded. Best of all, it’s chock full of careful dissections of age-old puzzles. Kart, who has worked for both the Chicago Tribune and Downbeat, is a sympathetic interviewer and critic, but no pushover: he’s willing to point out failings even in his biggest heroes. The ellipticality of Wayne Shorter and what might be called the rhythm-centricity of Warne Marsh are two examples of shortcomings he finds in a couple of his avowed gods. He can admit when he may have overstated a bit, too: both a 1978 overly-psychologistic piece on Cecil Taylor and a 1983 critique of Bill Evans, in which Kart basically accuses the pianist of the occasional manufacture of pure treacle, were subjected to recent reassessment. His deepest preferences seem to be for saxophonists and singers, with the most fervent tributes directed toward Lee Konitz, Ornette Coleman, Shorter, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan. But Kart also has ample sympathy and understanding for composers, pianists, and trumpeters. Several of his pieces lovingly describe how he got the bug himself, telling of his youthful encounters with the new music in his hometown Chicago; others, like his review of Count Basie’s autobiography, Good Morning Blues, are moving and elegant.

To his credit, Kart is not embarrassed by his descriptions of being blown away at some of the many gigs he’s attended—whether or not the player doing the blowing is currently supposed to be a top-notch artist. For example, in a 1982 piece on Oscar Peterson, he tells us that “Overdrive [is the pianist’s] most effective gear….[H]is music begins to make sense only when he wheels his screeching keyboard right to the edge of a cliff.” But unlike many contemporary heavy-breathers on the music-writing scene, several of Kart’s essays provide considerable evidence of a depth of understanding of music's complexities. His careful discussion of the similarities and differences between Lennie Tristano and Bach is a case in point, and certainly one can tell how hard he has thought about the issues surrounding Tristano’s use of tape manipulation on some of the pianist’s recordings:

"The process whereby Tristano speeded up the tapes of his piano playing on “Line Up” and “East Thirty-Second” to match the prerecorded (and also fiddled with) bass and drum work of Peter Ind and Jeff Morton inspired a fair amount of controversy at the time, and while it died away when “C Minor Complex” made clear again what ought to have been obvious from the first—that Tristano could execute at the speed of [those tunes] without electronic assistance—perhaps his justification for what he did (“the result sounded good to me”) ought be taken literally. That is, by recording bass-register piano lines and speeding up the tapes until the pitch of the piano lines was raised on octave, Tristano not only made the lines move faster, but he also made a new sound. The lower in register a note on the piano is, the more slowly it “speaks” and the less rapidly it decays. By forcing that effect upwards, Tristano altered the attack-decay relationship of each note—adding a tremendously propulsive, Chu Berry-like buzz or whoosh to tones that couldn’t possibly have had that effect, that sound, if they actually had been played in the piano’s middle register."

As illuminating and riveting as many of his one-off pieces are, however, the centerpiece of his Jazz in Search of Itself is constituted by the seven related pieces that make up the section of the book Kart calls “The Neo Con Game.” Here, the author delves deeply into some of the thorniest questions in the history of music criticism. Perhaps I can rephrase them this way: “What is (or would be) wrong with somebody writing (or playing) music like Mozart’s (or Miles Davis’s) today? If the composer/performer is highly skilled and the original forms have intrinsic value, mustn’t the latter-day replicas also be valuable? Why should Stravinsky’s or Hindemith’s neo-classicism be considered a step forward – if indeed it should – while the Wynton/Branford Marsalis approach to jazz over the past 20 years is derided as little more than a sort of facile mimicry?" While I can hardly do justice to Kart’s extremely discerning commentary in a review, I think it will be illustrative to provide a couple of excerpts. Before doing so, however, I want to point out that Kart’s critique of the “neo-cons” is as far less polemical than it could be. His earliest piece on Wynton, “Marsalis at Twenty-One” [1983] is sympathetic and hopeful—Kart obviously believes that the trumpeter’s astonishing gifts might, over time, result in a jazz titan. Kart can’t be criticized for being a partisan avant-gardist, in any case. While an avid admirer of Coleman’s harmonic advances, Evan Parker’s circular-breathing chops, and Roscoe Mitchell’s affinities with the fifteenth-century contrapuntalist Guillaume Dufay (!), Kart clearly prefers Konitz and Stan Getz to Cecil Taylor, and never even mentions Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, or Derek Bailey in the book. In fact, though he devotes an essay to Frank Zappa, a piece on prosody makes it abundantly clear that Kart has much more affinity for Cole Porter than for either Lennon or Dylan. Each page of the book reestablishes how deep the author’s roots are in swing and bop. However, as the Marsalises’ fame and influence increase over time, one can almost see Kart shaking his head in discouragement. Branford, he says, “seems to be playing at jazz instead of just playing it—as though his involvement with the music were based on a paradoxical need to fend off its emotional demands.” Again, he chides, “What Coltrane left behind was not a ‘hip’ style, but a drive toward ecstatic transcendence.” And, by the mid-eighties, Kart is willing to judge that “the effect of [Wynton’s] music is oddly and disappointingly bland.” He concludes that “there would seem to be something illusory in the hope that solid ground can be found in the jazz styles of the mid-1960s (particularly the music of the Miles Davis Quintet)—which is where most of today’s would-be neoclassicists plant their flags—for that music was always unstable, an art of emotional and technical brinkmanship.” Kart is nearly as hard on David Murray, of whom he says that the turn towards orthodoxy after experimental early work seems a sign of conscious guile, an “eagerness to gratify his and his audience’s desires to experience in the present a way of playing jazz that a short while ago seemed to belong only to the past.” The final nail in the neo-con coffin comes in a contemporary summing-up in which Wynton Marsalis is made to be nothing so much as a modern-day Paul Whiteman, “not in terms of the kinds of music they made but of the cultural roles they filled....the tuxedoed Whiteman, wielding his baton like Toscanini [and] Marsalis, the articulate whiz kid, equally at home with Miles Davis and Haydn and foe of rap and hip-hop.” It’s a devastating critique.

Kart’s devotes one graceful piece to Jack Kerouac’s relationship to jazz—his use of it both as subject matter and as inspiration for prose style. Unsurprisingly, the essay is as fertile as those on the musicians Kart discusses:

"t is the sound of men like [brew] Moore and [Allen] Eager, not the heated brilliance of Charlie Parker or the adamant strength of Thelonious Monk, that he managed to capture....‘These are men!’ wrote William Carlos Williams of Bunk Johnson’s band, and he certainly was right, as he would have been if he had said that of Louis Armstrong or Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter or Thelonious Monk. But there is something boyish in the music of Allen Eager and Brew Moore—and in the music of Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Teschemacher, for that matter—a sense of loss in the act of achievement, the pathos of being doubly outside. That is an essential part of their story; and when he was on his game, Jack Kerouac knew that it was an essential part of his story too."

To conclude, Jazz in Search of Itself is a very satisfying book. Although most of the pieces are short—none more than three or four pages—not a single one is without some valuable kernel that can be reflected on at length. How is it possible to pack so much thought and feeling into these little essays? Well, it’s a bit like Arnett Cobb’s solo on “Just a Closer Walk With Thee.” As Kart explains, Cobb "began a chorus with a seemingly simple two-note phrase, which might be rendered onomatopoetically as ‘Yah-duh.’ Now I suppose you had to be there to hear what that ‘‘Yah-duh’ did, but let me assure you that within its apparent simplicity there was more musical meaning than words could exhaust. Aside from the way he attacked the fist note, creating a catapulting sense of swing, there was the way its relative density—its heavy, centered sound—contrasted with the grainier, more oblique tonal texture of the second note. The effect of this might be compared to a gymnast’s second, more easeful bounce on a trampoline....The creation and control of such effects, in which the abstract and emotional aspects of jazz become one thing, is what Cobb’s music is all about. And if the principles at work in that ‘Yah-duh,’ which lasted no more than a second, are expanded to cover an entire performance, it is easy to imagine just how richly varied this master’s language can be."—WH (Walter Horn)

from Classical.net

Unlike most jazz fans, I came to the music relatively late, in grad school. The music never was an essential part of my growing up, not like classical and classic pop. Even at this late date, over thirty years later, I still feel that I'm playing catch-up and that I'm missing something important about the music. I've read a fair bit about jazz, especially about the players and composers I regularly listen to, but I don't really know them from inside-out. I like what I hear, from all periods, but usually don't know why in any significant detail. When I listen to myself think on jazz, I hear echoes of books I've read, not my own voice.

So it was a little surprising for me to get this review copy from the publisher. I seriously considered giving the book a miss, but when Yale calls, I snap to.

Most books on jazz fall into three types: biographical, sociological, and impressionistic. The biographical usually follows the life and career of some jazz great (or even not-so-great), concentrating on amusing anecdote and horrendous personal train wrecks, and at its best gives us a convincing (if not necessarily true) version of a life. The sociological approach seeks to give you the importance to the culture in general of the music. The impressionist tries to capture the sensations flickering over the writer's brain-fields while listening to a particular cut or solo. Very few books deal with the ins and outs of the music itself. Gunther Schuller's massive The Swing Era is an exception, as is, on a smaller scale, Alec Wilder's American Popular Song. Kart gives us a collection of essays, essentially fugitive pieces, and manages at one time or another to take all three roads. In addition, however, Kart practices criticism - not the "thumbs-up/thumbs-down" Consumer Reports variety foisted on us by a good deal of journalism, but criticism which tries to know the thing in itself. I strongly suspect that Kart has studied critical theory, because his arguments are so solid and so free of the annoying, first-semester-freshman stumbles that plague music criticism in particular. Kart routinely makes distinctions among what he hears, what it means to him, and what it may mean to the performer or creator. When he argues against the ultimate value of, say, the neoconservatives (Wynton and Branford Marsalis, John Faddis, and David Murray, for example), he makes the best case he can for them before moving on to the demolition work. Even here, he takes on the critical big guns rather than the straw men. He also very carefully points out that he could be wrong. But he has an obvious faith in the jostle of debate sorting out false leads and arriving somewhere closer to things as they really are.

The essays take on major topics: the current state of jazz, the pitfalls (aesthetic, as well as economic and psychological) facing jazz musicians building a career, the key figures in the development of the music and what made them key, the uneasy relations between jazz and classical, the jazz "life." In addition, Kart tells me about the music itself - his most sustained run an analysis of Ellington's "The Sergeant Was Shy," certainly not one of Ellington's better-known recordings (that is, one I haven't heard). Reading Kart inspired me to hunt this piece down. Kart ranges over a lot of different music, jazz, classical, and other - and literature and criticism besides. Of course he displays detailed knowledge of the line of jazz from pre-jazzers like Joplin and Lamb through the avant-gardistes of the Sixties and Seventies to wherever we are now. However, he also writes allusively and suggestively, only possible if you have great familiarity with material that normally has nothing to do with the object at hand. Stravinsky, Stockhausen, and Wagner appear to make real points, rather than to hear their names called. I recall in particular a stunning analogy between the music of saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell and fourteenth-century polyphony. Kart isn't showing off. He makes a telling point on the independence of rhythm related to a new alignment of tonality.

If that weren't enough, Kart also writes some of the best prose I've ever encountered. The following paragraph, on Thelonious Monk, displays most of his virtues, both intellectual and stylistic.

His very name suggests eccentricity, and there was behavior to back up that image - the sly, elflike dance steps that Monk (a physically imposing figure) sometimes would indulge in after a piano solo; the unusual titles of many of his compositions ("Misterioso," "Epistrophy," "Off Minor," "Nutty," "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are," and "Rhythm-a-ning"); and his reclusive role in recent years (he last performed in public in 1975). Yet if the notion of eccentricity is extended to Monk's music, nothing could be further from the truth, for he may have been the most logical composer-performer jazz has yet produced. Listen, for example, to Monk's composition "Little Rootie Tootie," which, like his "Locomotive," Luckey Roberts's "Railroad Blues," and Duke Ellington's "Daybreak Express" and "Happy Go-Lucky Local," belongs to the long jazz tradition of pieces that imitate the sound of railroad trains. An impressive portrait, with its chugging chords perfectly capturing the sound of a steam engine leaving the station, "Little Rootie Tootie" becomes an astonishing musical discourse after the theme has been stated and the piano solo begins. Like Alexander Pope's spider, who "feels at each thread and lives along the line," Monk spins out a steadily evolving pattern of musical thought in which the most practical and the most abstract virtues become one thing. Simultaneously delicate and strong, as joyful as a nursery rhyme and as grave as a hymn, "Little Rootie Tootie," like so many of Monk's creations, has an unshakeable aura of finality to it, as though his way were the only way to proceed. And it is this quality of utter completeness, as rare in jazz as it is in any other music (or any other art for that matter), that made Monk a master.

If you think about it, a music critic's basic job seems incredibly difficult. You've got to give the reader an idea of what the music is like in words, rather than in the actual musical sounds. Bernard Shaw made it a point of pride that he could write meaningfully about music without ever resorting to musical type. About the only time he ever did so was when he made fun of those who thought they needed staff line and notes. Kart, like Shaw, realizes that musical events are not simply constructs of the brain, but audible, thus available to anybody with ears. He has the gift of describing these events in a way that listeners, even not knowing the piece, have some idea of what it sounds like. He also provides those who have heard the piece with signposts that point toward discovery, a jazz version of What to Listen For in Music. Note the beautiful choice of the word "chugging" and the balanced, opposing similes "joyful as a nursery rhyme . . . grave as a hymn." Notice how he suggests the quality of extreme attentiveness in Monk, without actually stating it, in the quote from Pope, and the musical qualities of the prose itself - all those m's in the last sentence, for example, magically transforming the word Monk into musical master. Kart talks about stuff notoriously hard to pin down, in prose that, for all its virtuosity, remains clear and without sacrificing the subtlety and multiple layers of thought.

I think it worthwhile to talk some of Kart's critical foundation, particularly as it relates to the jazz neoconservatives. In general he takes an intricate Romantic view of jazz itself. For him, the primary creative value of jazz lies in its expression of an individual point of view. The performer is, to a great extent, the composer, even when working on pre-existing material. Coleman Hawkins's "Body and Soul" differs significantly from that of the tune's creator, Johnny Green. Indeed, it's that difference that makes the Hawkins valuable, analogous to Bach's reworkings of Vivaldi. To Kart, the jazz solo isn't merely a working-out of related musical ideas, but (in the words of Elgar), "a man's attitude to life." This doesn't necessarily mean that the soloist works out his own life, any more than Shakespeare dealt with his own problems in King Lear. Kart quotes a novelist to the effect that an artist creates art for complex artistic reasons, as well as for complex psychological ones. Kart also recognizes the ambiguity of a creator's commitment to the emotion expressed, often using the metaphor of drama and irony. Nevertheless, for Kart the value of art lies in some personal "stamp." This seems his primary criticism against the neo-cons. Classical music, of course, doesn't place the same kind of emphasis on performers. It's enough for Fleisher to play superbly. He doesn't have to have the immediately identifiable, individual approach of Tureck or Richter. In any case, classical performers even approaching jazz-level originality are pretty rare - Stokowski, Schnabel, Bernstein, Gould, Szell, Gieseking, Callas, and Rostropovich come to mind - and in many quarters are regarded as tasteless freaks. Instead, classical music puts its demands for individuality primarily on the composer. Since jazz usually regards the player as composer, this pressure gets transferred.

Kart's view makes a lot of sense - or it did, in the first half-century or so of jazz. Jazz continually renewed itself. A player like Lester Young could not only inspire disciples but also encourage others to find a path through the grounds he laid out to a whole new garden. It's kind of like Haydn and Mozart begetting Beethoven begetting Schubert - none of whom, incidentally, are worrying about "the direction of music," the development of "The Classical Style," or the "Dawn of Romanticism." As jazz continued, however, the sheer body of work grew. The "tradition" stopped being a process of renewal and increasingly became a static body of knowledge. This is also pretty close to the current state of classical music. At least, while I see a host of good, perhaps even great composers around, I don't see anybody changing or extending the landscape. Our avant-garde seems pretty tame, compared to what went on in the Twenties and Thirties. I would say the same holds true in all the arts today. Currently, there is no Beethoven or Schoenberg, Goethe or Pound, Turner or Picasso. I don't think that the arts are dead, as some have claimed for jazz (not Kart, by the way). We simply - well, not exactly "simply" - need a certain kind of artist to come along and shake things up in a way that leads somewhere. I agree with Kart that the Marsalis brothers (all of them) are probably not going to do that. The tradition intimidates them, rather than frees them. That doesn't make them dreck, however. The large corpus of jazz needs now the "repertory" player, to a great extent what the Marsalises are, in addition to the innovator. A recording, even a great one - and recording, as older players die, becomes the primary artistic repository of jazz - is, as classical aficionados know, frozen and unchanging, and as such threatens artistic renewal, particularly when it comes to be regarded as an inviolate exhibit in the Temple of Art. People on both sides of the debate do this, although Kart's an emphatic exception. The only way the tradition gets renewed is if it means enough to performers/composers/listeners to want to perform, write, or listen to its current expression, the way it's going to be done tonight - in other words, as long as it's a living thing. As Vaughan Williams pointed out, it takes a lot of mediocre composers, all plugging away, to make it possible for the great composer to come along. Bach didn't just happen. He came from a living tradition of North German organ music, from writers worse than him. So, in all, I'm a lot kinder to revivalists than Kart.

My one complaint with the book is the lack of an index (bad form, Yale!). You might retort, "It's essays, not a scholarly tome," but Kart's thought is so rich, I want something that helps me find the nuggets quickly.

Steve Schwartz

[fasstrack]

Guess you should be careful in life what you ask for.....

That review was longer than the dead Sea Scrolls. Hurt my finger just t scroll through it. But if I see it around I'll leaf through. If I like it I'll.......try to mooch a copy from you.

What the hell, I've done so much for you already you owe me that much, don't you?

[Larry Kart]

I still have a few copies (nine) around, but Amazon's price ($29.83) isn't that much higher than what I paid per copy for them, plus what it would cost me in shipping. With Amazon, shipping is free on an order over $25.

[ghost of miles]

Good jazz writing demands a high degree of integrity, insight, and (I would argue) respect for the musicians about whom one is writing. That respect works both ways--the writer needs to call 'em as he or she hears 'em. I guess I don't understand your complaint, FT; was Larry's remark too clever a summation of what he heard in Brookmeyer's playing?

Gratuitous slams against artists are uncalled for, whether they come from a Bob Brookmeyer or some poor sap who can't blow "I Got Rhythm" on a kazoo. Having read much of Larry's book, I'd say he is one of the least likely jazz writers to ever indulge in such a practice. Far better worthies than me (including Jim Sangrey, who surely is one of the best barometers around for measuring snide fallacies and general b.s.) seem to think so as well.

[fasstrack]

Good jazz writing demands a high degree of integrity, insight, and (I would argue) respect for the musicians about whom one is writing. That respect works both ways--the writer needs to call 'em as he or she hears 'em. I guess I don't understand your complaint, FT; was Larry's remark too clever a summation of what he heard in Brookmeyer's playing?

Gratuitous slams against artists are uncalled for, whether they come from a Bob Brookmeyer or some poor sap who can't blow "I Got Rhythm" on a kazoo. Having read much of Larry's book, I'd say he is one of the least likely jazz writers to ever indulge in such a practice. Far better worthies than me (including Jim Sangrey, who surely is one of the best barometers around for measuring snide fallacies and general b.s.) seem to think so as well.

Alright already. I said I was sorry. Let it go, will you?

Yeah, Brook definitely did his share of dishing it out on his late Jazz Corner site. Particularly obsessed with Wynton. That old devil jealousy, I guess, in part. But he did have some points, at least until he beat it into the ground and wouldn't stop. I emailed him and politely asked him to please shut the fuck up and write some more great music. He basically agreed. He's a great artist with a great big mouth. I guess that's his privilege. He's a big boy. But if you dish it out......Personally, I think it's pretty classless to spend time on your own website trashing good players. That's indefensible to me, and stinks whatever 'justification' given. Writing is like playing to me. Give your best from your heart and don't bore the people with your personal BS. They didn't pay to hear that or surf in to read it neither.

On the other hand, there are things that need a gadfly to expose, so he did some good too---every so often.

[fasstrack]

I still have a few copies (nine) around, but Amazon's price ($29.83) isn't that much higher than what I paid per copy for them, plus what it would cost me in shipping. With Amazon, shipping is free on an order over $25.

I was joking with you, Larry (about the mooching part). Certainly an astute observer like yourself can recognize sarcasm without a rubric or red arrows pointing to it. But in case you didn't get it, the joke was my chutzpah in asking for a free book after lighting into you the way I did.

Which is not unlike the old one about the guy who murders both his parents then asks the court for leniency because he's an orphan .

If I see it in a bookstore and like it I will purchase it.

[Larry Kart]

Fasstrack, I understood you were joking about the freebie but wanted to mention Amazon (Barnes & Noble online too), and the fact that I still had some copies because I haven't seen many copies in bookstores myself. In fact, I sold one from my stash a while back to a friend in Canada (as a gift for a relative) because he'd ordered it from a local bookstore before Christmas and it still hadn't arrived two months later. The whole publisher/distributor/brick-and-mortar store side of the book business seems like it might be kind of screwed up to me. I have another friend who went into some supposedly topnotch Manhattan bookstore soon after the bopok came out, tried to order it, and was told by the bored young clerk that that would be too much trouble.

[fasstrack]

Fasstrack, I understood you were joking about the freebie but wanted to mention Amazon (Barnes & Noble online too), and the fact that I still had some copies because I haven't seen many copies in bookstores myself. In fact, I sold one from my stash a while back to a friend in Canada (as a gift for a relative) because he'd ordered it from a local bookstore before Christmas and it still hadn't arrived two months later. The whole publisher/distributor/brick-and-mortar store side of the book business seems like it might be kind of screwed up to me. I have another friend who went into some supposedly topnotch Manhattan bookstore soon after the bopok came out, tried to order it, and was told by the bored young clerk that that would be too much trouble.

You have won the war of attrition. I'm buying your damn book---not a priority, such as rent, finishing my CD on my nickel, leg waxing (OK, I lied about that last one) but I promise I will. I like your persistence. You got the fire in your belly and the Fasstrack can relate. Call it one crazed Yid recognizing another .

It better be good, though, or I'm comin' to look for you

Edited April 13, 2006 by fasstrack

[Larry Kart]

A landsman. How did you know?

[Chuck Nessa]

Can we book a room for you guys?

[fasstrack]

Can we book a room for you guys?

as long as you're paying, go ahead.....

Or maybe I should say 'be my guest'

[fasstrack]

A landsman. How did you know?

Beacause you have to have the last word----and I can see your hands moving while doing so.

Or maybe the giveaway was that piquant yet succinct title of your other tome: "Jewboy: The Larry Kart Story"

[Lazaro Vega]

Steve Schwartz wrote: The "tradition" stopped being a process of renewal and increasingly became a static body of knowledge.

That sure enough nails it.