Impressive Brubeck-Desmond "These Foolish Things"

[AllenLowe]

I can't stand late Pepper, with a few notable exceptions, when he stops trying to be "contemporary," and just plays the damn horn - when I spent a day with him in Boston, circa 1976, he kept telling me that he was tired of being passed over by the image of Coltrane - and I think this explains a lot of what he was trying to become - still, in performance in those days, he could be a stunning blower - and when someone gave him a clarinet at Paul's Mall that night, well, I've never heard clarinet playing like that before or since. A lot of his problems have to do with something I will avoid in detail here so as not to start another battle/exchange with Jim - Pepper's lack of undestanding of modal playing and the idea of vertical versus horizontal lines; suffice to say that I have also heard Frank Morgan, in person, stumble over a false idea of what it means to be "contemporary" as a horn player -

as for Desmond, my problems with him are related to personality, I think - from what little I have read about him I get a sense of a kind of false erudition, a sense of humor and irony that is both distancing and somewhat shallow and middlebrow - which is exactly the way I feel about his playing; I've tried to get with it (figuring that Braxton knows what he's talking about) but I just cannot listen to more than about 8 bars of Desmond's horn -

[Man with the Golden Arm]

and Hogan strikes me as more Braxtonian, without the sweater, of course.