on 12/18/03 11:25 PM, David Slusser at slusser@pixar.com wrote:
That last statement is a bit provocative, considering Don Cherry, and Texas transplant Bobby Bradford are LA contemporaries, but I gotta admit, despite his willingness to do showbiz schtick, Jack Sheldon has been the real deal on trumpet, going on 50 years. Personal fav: "Complete" from 'You Get More Bounce with Curtis Counce".
Good point, and I likely should have qualified -- I never saw Cherry, Ornette, Bley, Mingus or Dolphy as representative of the West Coast scene. They seemed to me to be away from everything else. I think they'd have come to the same muscial conclusion if they'd emerged from any American city. I always thougt of Jimmy Giufre as the prototype West Coast avant garde guy. And those Counce records are dazzling. Glad to see I'm not the only one who owns 'em.
As for Chet Baker, James Gavin has a recent book out that's pretty interesting, but after a while, just like Art Pepper, you stop feeling sorry for the guy. (Interesting that Pepper, though they made a record together, despised Baker for being a snitch, where Pepper held the con's code of silence.) Sheldon & Baker make a great contrast.
I read that thing. A friend loaned it to me with the warning, "At some point in the book, you just wonder why he never ... you know." I figured about what "you know" meant when the book got to his first trip to Italy. The guy never took any responsibility for anything in his life. skip h