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AllenLowe
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Posts posted by AllenLowe
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The Monk tracks are interesting for a number of reasons. Mary Lou Williams once commented that Monk, in those days, was playing like Teddy Wilson; on the evidence of those recordings he was definitely working in that idiom, though he already had his own take in it. And he developed very quickly - there is an Onyx LP of Monk backing another soloist - I forget which - in which he plays Nice Work If You Can get and Melcancholy Baby; it is from 1941 and he is already the definitive Monk -
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What's wrong with you guys? Can't you see "she's" definitely a cross-dresser. The jock strap bulge gives it away -
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while I like those songs, I think they represent what is truly wrong with Dylan, and why, though I admire his music, he is really not the poet he wants to be - he is just so above everyone and self-righteous that it blocks any true vision. At the risk of inflaming Clementine, I must quote something that Francis Davis, in his article on Dylan, notes, from Yeats: "we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” As Davis correctly adds, “Dylan has never been able to tell the difference.”
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Hardman appeared in Hartford with Junior Cook sometime in the 1980s, I recall. I knew the bass player he was working with, so I got to meet him briefly - I heard him talking about Blakey backstage. Boy, if someone had a tape recorder, it would have been almost as good as the Buddy Rich tapes. Let's just say he was hostile for financial reasons -
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When he was in Boston we spent a day together, as I was writing a profile for a local jazz magazine - he had missed his methadone shot, and was arguing with Laurie about it - it turns out, the real reason he missed it was becasue it required a drug/urine test, which he did not want to take, for obvious reasons - so that day, leading up to the gig, at his request, I drove him around Boston where he made various stops to see "friends' - by evening he was feeling much better -
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good points - funny thing is, for me, when I heard him in person (in Boston, near the beginning of his comeback, can't remember what year) he sounded great on everything, ballads, tempos. Than I remember listening to the Vanguard recordings and thinking, "this is a different guy" -
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Interesting, Mike - it was Dave's wife who described it to me as "the Buddy Rich Band" but I never asked her (or Dave) for a time frame - and it's also possible that, having met Dave in that band in 1950, that that was why Buddy hired him later on. Unfortunately, both Dave and his wife are dead so it's unlikely I'll get a definitive answer -
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Yes, I forgot about the Nat Cole/Prez/Buddy sides, which are among my favorites; but I don't think I would put Buddy ahead of Dave Tough, who was really quite fantastic in both small and large groups; for small groups. off the top of my head: Improvisation for the March of Time (1946, led by Wild Bill Davison),and I'm sure there's others, for big band things, of course, the sides with Woody Herman. I once had a nice conversation with Max Roach, who described how much he liked Tough's playing, and how Tough used to sit right in front of the drums on 52nd Street, fascinated by the beboppers. He was also a bit of an intellectual, wrote a column for Metronome I think, and died very tragically in the street, from a drunken fall. Barrett Deems has described how Tough's family refused to let his wife, who was black, come to the funeral - typically tragic jazz story, all in all - the amazing thing about Tough was how much his time seemed to breathe with the band - his playing had an elasticity, inwhich he almost seemed to stretch the beat, and then snap it right back into place -
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How about, for a title, "Am I Blue"? That shows that you are asking the question of certain singers who would not necessarily, in the conventional sense, be put in that category -
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Maybe instead of "overlooked" we should charcterize certain altos as "underlooked" -
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I must admit I never liked the Buddy Rich big band - too much bombast, and I found his playing to be very brittle and showy - and than one night I saw a clip with Buddy and a small group from the Playboy jazz Fest and was completely knocked out - he was with an all-star small band that included Dizzy, and maybe he didn't feel like he had to show off or something, but he was phenomenal, really kicking and driving it. Sounding - though I didn't really know it than - a LOT like Dave Tough -
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How about "White Noise?" Just kidding - thematically, I've always thought it was interesting how blues began to permeate white pop music in the 1940s and after, through Peggy Lee, et al - and I would look at black singers like Lil Green or Ella Johnson as representative of the beginning of this kind of cross-fertilization. My only problem with your title is that it seems a little old hat, and has been said already - it might be time to come up with a new angle, but damned if I know what it is -
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Personally I find Pepper's late ballad playing self-absorbed and maudlin, though many people have disagreed -
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Well, let's not forget that the hippies wrote some GOOD comic books. I still love the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and read them often. Extremely funny stuff. As for jazz versus rock and other kinds of music, well, I must admit, over the last five years my ratio of rock and roll listening to jazz is about 4 to 1, hillbilly to jazz about 5 to 1. It's easy, as a jazz lover, to forget the power of "simpler" forms, but give me Kelly Harrell over most young lions, The Chocolate Watchband over just about any academic composer -
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SN WOLFE: Given your feelings about pseudo-bohemianism (which I largely share) you might appreciate Zappa's own distinction between hippies and freaks; he liked freaks and hated hippes for their pretensions. And Frank was a pain in his self-righteousness, but did plenty of good work after 1970. As for that suburban birthright of narcissicism, well, it also makes me think of the anti-war movement of the 1960s - the biggest jerks were always the rich kids, they were the most hedonistic radicals of all, willing to put anyone at risk but themselves, to talk the talk in the stupidist and most destructive and self-deluded kind of way - hence Jane Fonda and other rich kid radicals who, when the smoke died down, had already moved on, to Republicanism or the family business, while everyone else did the real work. But we shouldn't forget that out of these bohemian/political movements came things that liberated many people, and a very golden age of rock and roll, and some good writing and poetry (lots of good Ginsberg, Burroughs and Junky, Kerouac and the Subterraneans, Vanity of Duluoz, and more). Chuck: I spent a memorable day with Art and Laurie in Boston during the beginning of his comeback and know what you mean, I found Art an interesting combination of nice guy/hustler/pyscho/b.s. artist/jazzer. But when he took the stand, all else was forgotten (and presumably forgiven) -
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well, if we thought all opinions were equal, we would not have any - because than they would not be opinions but facts -
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"As all opinions are equal, right?"
no - not really - but it is also, as you noted, a matter of style. And that's not crap -
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hey, I never said that -
(edited by Allen Lowe at 5:00 to completely distort the meaning of prior posts)
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hey Larry - who asked YOU? We were having a high old time just insulting each other - I feel like its the end of recess and the teacher's making us go back to the subject -
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hey Cornelius - I think I'll go back and edit those old posts so it looks like I'm only attacking Dan Gould -
(edited by Allen Lowe at 4:39 to add more insults)
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Hi Cornelius -
I think that, in my mind, I lumped yours and Dan Gould's posts together, and this was extremely unfair - my apologies -
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I think Dan Gould is a scholar.
(edited by Allen Lowe at 4:03)
I think Dan Gould is an idiot.
(edited by Allen Lowe at 4:04)
I think I know Dan Gould. Isn't he Donald Rumsfeld's assistant?
(edited by Allen Lowe at 4:05)
Dan Gould forgot to take his meds today -
(edited by Dan Gould's doctor at 4:06)
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I'm glad we're getting back down to business here - and just to kick a dead horse, I'm not going to refresh until I finsih the post I'm working on - so that's irrelevant - I will back up a bit with Jordan, and I do agree that Jordu is a significant composition toward hard bop - harmonically it has almost a modal kind of energy, though it contains plenty of changes - which is a good description of a lot of hard bop writing. It's just in the realm of sound and approach that I think he differs - and, as I mentioned, if you listen, he has a lot of ties to the swing era in his rhythmic approach -
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Actually, I was thinking Frankfurt University -
Terri
in Miscellaneous - Non-Political
Posted
maybe we SHOULD end this thread and get onto wholesome pastimes, like making fun of the dead -