Kenton!

[brewski]

Who was your favorite chart master for the Kenton Band?

[JSngry]

 

[Chuck Nessa]

Fascinating.

[Peter Friedman]

Bill Holman

[paul secor]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

 

Much more interesting for me to look at the designs on the score than to listen to the music.

[sgcim]

19 minutes ago, paul secor said:

Much more interesting for me to look at the designs on the score than to listen to the music.

Well said!

[Larry Kart]

1 hour ago, paul secor said:

Much more interesting for me to look at the designs on the score than to listen to the music.

Don't agree. I've been into Graettinger's music from way back when; it never ceases to fascinate.

[Teasing the Korean]

Rugolo, Graettinger, and Johnny Richards. 

Neither Holman nor Russo ever did much for me. 

I file Kenton in the Space Age Bachelor Pad section rather than jazz, because that is where he truly belongs.  Although I have two of the Johnny Richards albums in the Latin section and "Hair" in the Now Sound section. 

23 minutes ago, Larry Kart said:

Don't agree. I've been into Graettinger's music from way back when; it never ceases to fascinate.

Agree, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't want it on a shower curtain. 

Edited January 31, 2018 by Teasing the Korean

[Guy Berger]

I like Kenton’s music but the Graettinger stuff is probably the only time it came close to living up to its own pretensions.  Post-Graettinger, sometimes it’s hard not to laugh.  Or groan.

Edited January 31, 2018 by Guy Berger

[Big Beat Steve]

9 hours ago, sgcim said:

Well said!

I bought the 10-incher of This Modern World at a fleamarket a long, long time ago. This was my first exposure to Grattinger, and though I did not listen to it that often I never found it as weird as others (writing on the subject) have made it out to be.

That shower curtain thing is a great idea, though ...

 

[Teasing the Korean]

2 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:

That shower curtain thing is a great idea, though ...

Seriously, MoMA should sell them!  It would be an instant buy. 

[JSngry]

10 hours ago, Guy Berger said:

I like Kenton’s music but the Graettinger stuff is probably the only time it came close to living up to its own pretensions.  Post-Graettinger, sometimes it’s hard not to laugh.  Or groan.

You can say Pretensions" or, instead, "ambitions", but either way, I look at it like Graettinger was everything that Kenton said he wanted to be. Where it maybe pivots from "ambition" to "pretention" is, like, not even Kenton himself could say with any certainty what it was, or if it was "good".

I've made my peace with Kenton by repositioning him as a corporate brand name rather than an individual artist. And after doing that, I find all kinds of things that I really dig, as well as any number of things that are just....silly.

I also have an aversion to "Pete Rugolo", just because. But the post-Graettinger library of "Stan Kenton" is full of individual delights, almost up to the end. Dee Barton, Bill Mathieu, Willie Maiden, those guys all wrote some great, idyosyncratic stuff for the band. And certainly, Bill Holman.

[ghost of miles]

Love the Graettinger and Holman Kenton sides--in general, Kenton's been a grower for me over the years.  I've always been curious about this one:

Kenton/Wagner

[brewski]

It was the best of bands ,it was the worst of bands. It was the pure tommy-rot of pretention, it was  the soul of soaring unselfconsciousness. It was the very stuff of swing, it was an egomaniacs demented dream of pompousness. It was as light as Basie and as heavy as Beethoven. It was indulgent and ecstatic ,funereal and joyful. It was,in short,a band like no other.         This G** damn it, was an orchestra. Thus spake  Kenton.                                                                                                                                                                                           --- Will Friedwald

[JSngry]

14 minutes ago, ghost of miles said:

Love the Graettinger and Holman Kenton sides--in general, Kenton's been a grower for me over the years.  I've always been curious about this one:

Kenton/Wagner

It's a very mixed bag, esthetically. It's surprisingly quiet in places, and the band executes very nicely.

On the down side, it's really not any kind of a reimaging, Kenton just took the original scores and orchestrated them for his band. That's legit, but not really anything "creative" in the generally understood sense.

More troubling is the relaying from Kenton in the liner notes of his meeting with Maurice Ravel. He tells it like him and Ravel really bonded and had an intimate discussion about music. Years later, he told the story like it was a brief, casual, superficial meeting. To me, this goes towards the long-standing "suspicion" I've had about Stan Kenton the person that he was just not "right" in some way, seemed to eager to take/snatch/appropriate/etc/whatever. And I still feel that. Not saying he was evil or anything, just that he himself was a facilitator more than anything else, but was more than happy to pimp and be pimped as an originator. Grrrr4r....

That's why I finally made my peace with the whole thing by separating the person from the brand name. Stan Kenton vs "Stan Kenton". The everything pretty much fell into place, and the good stuff started feeling good as well as sounding good.

[Teasing the Korean]

I thought the Kenton/Wagner album would be the loudest album ever made, but it bored me, and after two spins, I dragged it right back to the thrift store that sold it to me for 50 cents. 

[JSngry]

I bought three copies before I found one with clean enough vinyl to more fully hear the quiet. It was worth it, as far as it went.

But yeah, it's a lot more quiet than you would expect, but that might well go back to the fact that it's essentially a transcription rather than a reimagining. Not that "reimaging" was even a thing in 1965, but the act itself certainly was.

[Teasing the Korean]

2 hours ago, JSngry said:

I also have an aversion to "Pete Rugolo", just because. 

While I have not listened to entire Kenton Kanon, I always felt that Rugolo reinforced the group's modernist ideals without being ponderous nor heavy-handed.  His stuff is more fun, a quality that is severely lacking in much of Kenton.  I like Rugolo's writing for these reasons.  The stuff on his solo albums can really vary track to track, but the best stuff is right up my alley, like this one:

 

 

[JSngry]

I went so far as to get the first Kenton Mosaic. Rugolo was a formula writer, and his formulas are real easy to pick up not too far into it. He did some charts where the formula worked because it stayed within itself (I still have fond feelings for "Machito") but jesus, math is math and his is neither subtle nor particularly varied. I guess blatancy and surprise are different sides of the same coin, but that's a bad penny afaic, throw it in the fountain and wish that it never comes around again.

Sure, he kind of took Kenton's core "ideas" and realized them in about the most commercially exploitable way possible, but even with the "Progressive Jazz" material, even he himself tried to move on (how successfully, you decide). And once the Innovations/Dance band schizophrenia finally wore off, no Kenton writer went back to that basic a formula.

And then there's Gene Roland, a mixed bag if ever there was one, but Adventures In Blues, if you ever want to hear Basie As Frankenstein (and I mean that in a good way), then there's Gene Roland.

[John Tapscott]

Yep. Gene Roland - the most underappreciated writer Kenton ever had (and maybe Ken Hanna, too)

But whenever the band needed a 'hit' record to recover financially from a grand experiment it seemed to be either Roland or Kenton himself who pulled it off.  

 

Edited February 1, 2018 by John Tapscott

[Teasing the Korean]

19 hours ago, JSngry said:

Rugolo was a formula writer.

I"m not hearing that, but maybe we've listened to different stuff.  He had his bag of tricks, but so does every arranger.

Shifting gears, I had high hopes for this album, based on the cover art.  Boy was I disappointed.

[gmonahan]

On 1/31/2018 at 10:06 AM, JSngry said:

 

And then there's Gene Roland, a mixed bag if ever there was one, but Adventures In Blues, if you ever want to hear Basie As Frankenstein (and I mean that in a good way), then there's Gene Roland.

Always liked "Adventures in Blues" and wished Roland had done more writing for the band...at least more that got recorded.

 

gregmo

[JSngry]

Apparently, Gene Roland was a true "character"...he wrote for the band sporadically but for a long time.

I like his soprano playing on Adventures In Blues too, sorta Lucky Thompson-y.

[Rabshakeh]

As a 90s/00s childe, Stan Kenton has always been the moment in jazz I find most impossible to understand.

He is obviously of extreme importance to jazz and how it turned out. He appears in all the books. His bands apparently nurtured the career of roughly (and I am careful not to exaggerate here) 93% of post-war white jazz musicians of note. People loved his music (and in the case of British fans travelled internationally to hear it).

But I can't hear a single bit of that. I'd struggle to pick a soloist out, except for squealin' Maynard. With all that dissonance it isn't even a very pleasant listen.

Edited September 2, 2023 by Rabshakeh

[John L]

I picked up a good number of Kenton releases over the years but hardly listen to any of it anymore.  There is just so much other music that I enjoy a lot more.