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AllenLowe
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Posts posted by AllenLowe
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On 8/1/2023 at 7:35 PM, Rabshakeh said:
I guess the question that I was trying to put across with the initial post is this: what is it that Armstrong invented and how was this form, and the form adopted by his successors, different to the surrounding non-jazz ecosystem?
I think that we can all hear what you are describing with respect to Armstrong, but I personally have a hard time analysing why it therefore feels natural to put Armstrong in a bag with e.g. Chris Connor and Joe Turner, and not with e.g. Al Green.
This is obviously true for all genres, where relationships between artists can sometimes be merely taxonomic or completely accidental. But it is perhaps more problematised here, because of the unusual split within the genre between vocal and instrumental forms (assuming that one believes vocal jazz is a genuine form of jazz, which I think we all do), which you don't find in most other musical genres.
The best analysis I can come up with is that Armstrong and Holiday, whether improvising or not, are capable of horn-like phrasing. I think that I would posit that, rather than ability to improvise, as the clearest marker of a top tier jazz vocalist. That's a personal view though and I don't think it fits most jazz singers that well.
these are difficult questions - but I think the essence of what Armstrong did was to destroy the concept of vocal realism in a Dadaesque way, to put an end to heart-on-sleeve emotionalism, creating a distance that actually made it more realistic, in the way it represented a kind of free-associating consciousness of melody and lyric; all while detaching melody from lyric in the same way that a modern artist might draw a human body that was both there and absent, in a type of free-floating spirit world of melody molded to lyric. Like with Joyce this was a much more compelling portrait of life as it is really experienced, of the way in which the mind freely associates experience with the consciousness of experience.
Even though now we have a certain awareness of artistic and aesthetic rationale of the type that I am reasonably certain Armstrong did not employ, in his way he knew all of it, it was ingrained in his soul and he drew, wittingly, upon a deep oral heritage that perceived of improvisation as a natural extension of life and hence consciousness. So it was being done elsewhere in black music, but not in the service of these kind of pop-conscious objects. -
46 minutes ago, gmonahan said:
Well, yeah, Satch was THE jazz singer! Don't know about Bing. I'd have to listen again to the early things.
I would check out the 1920s work like Tain't So; also I'm Comin' VIrginia with Whiteman.
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I just want to mention - and maybe somebody else has - that Louis Armstrong was mentioned in only a passing way on the first page of this thread - and he INVENTED jazz singing. I exaggerate not. The whole concept, phrasing, time, treatment of lyrics, comes from Armstrong.
And I should mention that early Bing is to my ears a great jazz singer, though I think in later years he compromised his style to hit the mainstream.
Also, no one has mentioned Al Bernard, of New Orleans, who had it all - time, phrasing. And Marion Harris, who many early listeners mistook for black. She was wonderful, had a terrific, firm approach that swung.
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I haven't been there in years but it was a great place, and I know Ricky Riccardi says it's still great. IIRC parking is easy.
I would just stay and forget about Maine.
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1 hour ago, Larry Kart said:
As sgcim says, how Chaloff did it -- "Beautiful tone that was almost completely in the upper range of the instrument, great ideas, great chops, no overdone vibrato" -- is something of a mystery. Smulyan fan that I've become, I'd say that he matches Serge in the instrument's lowest register, but in the upper register and in terms of overall articulation and ideas, no other baritonist comes close.
W'eve probably heard about the time Woody Herman, exasperated by Serge's frequently outrageous behavior stood next to him at the bar of the Sherman Hotel and while engaging him in conversation pissed down Serge's leg. Here's another one from the same period.
Eddie Higgins, then a student at Notre Dame, wanted to interview Serge for the school newspaper. He calls Serge's room at the Sherman and they agree on a time to talk. Eddie arrives at Serge's room. He smells smoke and knocks on the door, which is ajar. Eddie enters, and sees Serge sprawled on the rug, with one arm flung behind him, resting in the seat of a plush armchair, where the cigarette in Serge's hand has burned a substantial hole. "Mr. Chaloff," Eddie says, "the chair; it's on fire." Serge languidly turns his head to look, and says, "I'm hip."
Junkies are an adventure and a chore. I spent a weird day with Art Pepper in the '70s, basically driving him around looking for drugs. Helluva nice guy.
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4 hours ago, Quasimado said:
Allen - according to the current (7/31/2023) Wikipedia article on JR Monterose, Dave was with Buddy Rich during 1951/52? (nothing about recording, unfortunately).
"... he (JR) joined the Buddy Rich big band in late 1951.[1] Though the band had some excellent bop-oriented musicians (Rich, Dave Schildkraut, Allen Eager and Philly Joe Jones), Monterose soon left, citing the lack of soloing opportunities ..."
thanks - also, actually some years ago, someone (might have been Mike Fitzgerald) posted an actual picture of the Buddy Rich band with Dave in the sax section. Sadly, I seem to have lost it.
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On 7/13/2023 at 9:55 AM, Justin V said:
This arrived yesterday. I had three discs of this and hadn't listened to them in years, despite liking them (probably because they hadn't been ripped and uploaded to my YouTube Music library). I'm glad that finding a set listed for cheap prompted me to grab it. It's making think about grabbing the JATP Mosaic at some point.
Rich is best listened to in a small group setting, where he seems to have been able to channel his inner Dave Tough and play brilliantly. To my ears, after he became a star and started leading that later big band his work always sounds like "hey look at me."
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there's a young trumpet player in Baltimore, Brandon Woody, who is worth watching.
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for that kind of money you could have put these guys on a retainer and had them come over to the house and play every week.
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1 hour ago, sgcim said:
A woman that a friend of mine knows said she was doing a club date with Bill Evans, and the band was so bad, he started banging his head on the piano. Must have been a thing back then...
BTW, I read something by someone who said that Davey Schildkraut stopped playing jazz professionally because he wanted to work as a civil servant. Previously, an alto player I used to work with said it was because he lost his wife in a car accident. Do you know which one was the real story?
it's a little more complicated; he stopped playing music because, he said, he wanted to be with his family more. So he got a day job with the city of New York which was pretty menial. Then his daughter was killed in a car accident, which sent his wife to bed for about 10 years; she finally died of cancer. Beautiful, sweet lady, she just never got over it. As for Dave, he would have made some real money as a musician; Norman Granz was offering a tour, Dizzy offered several recording dates, all of which he turned down. But that was Dave.
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3 minutes ago, sgcim said:
Okay, playing percussively. I didn't mean it in a negative way; I love Monk.
nothing wrong with banging on a piano. One night back in the '70s I was at the Red Blazer in NYC watching Sol Yaged (a friend of mine, Bill Triglia, was playing piano). The band was awful; finally Bill took off his shoe and starting banging the keyboard with it. And here was a guy who had worked with Bird, with Lester Young, with Sonny Rollins - if he could do it anyone could.
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I assume it was an old-fashioned plate reverb, literally a plate. They used the real thing in those days; though plate reverbs can be a bit too lush. I may be wrong, but I don't think with those kind of things that they could control the amount on the recording, as you can with digital verbs (which I love). And I will say that I love those old-style rooms; I only had the opportunity to record twice at a similar place, Systems Two in Brooklyn (which is now closed). People can argue all day about the different between digital and analogue, but I feel certain that so much of what we complain about in the sonic differences between old and new jazz recordings is due to the old rooms, which in the old days were specifically designed for live recordings. The two CDs I made at Systems Two just sound....real, no isolation, musicians who could hear each other, no headphones, just a beautiful sound. Recording studios today tend to be designed to deaden the sound, to fight leakage, and to create the true acoustics in the board.
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On 7/17/2023 at 4:09 PM, greggery peccary said:
I'm just gonna be that guy...I never got into Coltrane. Early on I bought a bunch of his stuff because that was "jazz" as presented to me. It got pushed aside by other things that resonated more deeply with me- Mingus, Rahsaan, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Hutcherson, and Miles to name a few. I've revisited his stuff a couple of times through the decades but I'm still left flat. I even got "Love Supreme" on 180 gram vinyl through popmarket a few months ago at a deep discount. Meh.
Love abounds for him here and that's the beauty of art and music. What works for each of us is a highly personal thing.
So, even though I do have an appreciation for some of Dolphy's work, this is a pass for me.
Okay...let me have it. 🙂
It's quite all right - if I had posted something like that Justin V would pipe in to say that Coltrane had probably refused to collaborate with me; but the truth is it is quite possible to disagree with the majority.
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not a big fan of Henderson - there is something emotionally incomplete about his playing to my ears, it's like something that looks good on paper, but in reality doesn't have enough impact - but that's just me, however I do find him interesting at times and I respect his playing - but more important since there was some discussion about his development as a player, above, is what he told Dave Schildkraut and which Dave told me. Henderson told Dave that as long as bebop was the prevailing style he didn't feel he had what it takes, was not comfortable as a player; and that it was Coltrane who freed him up to be himself, who showed him that he didn't have to play the way the beboppers played in order to to a real player. I think this is quite illuminating and I, as a much lesser player, identify. One of the reasons I had to leave the Barry Harris orbit is that I just didn't fit into that system, much as I loved Barry personally and musically, and I finally realized there was a whole other way of musical life out there. Clearly this was what Henderson was talking about.
also, I don't think anyone has mentioned this, but I have always heard a stylistic resemblance between Cook and Booker Ervin. A sound, a certain hard dynamic.
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Invisible Man is an astounding novel, and doubly amazing is that it was really Ellison's only successful fiction. I have a theory - there were all kinds of stories of why he never produced another great novel, that he had lost a book on the subway, this had happened, that had happened - but I have read every other piece of fiction of his that I can find, some WPA stories, Juneteenth - and everything I have seen is just lifeless (his essays, which are brilliant, are another story). My theory is that this is the one great book he had in him, and we should stop worrying about what else he might have written. It doesn't matter. Invisible Man is epochal, really one of the great books of the modern era. We should all produce one solitary work with this kind of power and vision.
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12 minutes ago, John L said:
Mono and Lo Fi, but with clarity of sound.
thanks - the horns do sound a little distant on my meager laptop speakers. Gotta get it on a full system.
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someone may have answered this - but I am curious, is this a mono or a stereo recording?
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she is indeed extremely good, and she sticks out in a place where most singers, good and bad, have become, to my ears, somewhat generic. But I find that no matter how good they are I cannot listen for very long. Not sure I can put my finger on it but it is as though the whole genre - of jazz singing - lacks for a compelling alternative to the older styles. I used to think of Patty Waters as showing the way out, but that's been years since. I feel like there is some middle ground, some good use of lyric texts that might be possible (never did like late Betty Carter), but I just don't hear it anywhere. Maybe because I just don't find current songwriting compelling, lyrically or melodically. But there must be something somewhere.
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But all seriousness aside, I want a critic to tell me something I don't know, to show me something in the music that I have not already seen/heard. And there are a few who have done this, whom I think have made real contributions to American culture. In no special order I would mention:
1) Greg Tate in his earlier days. Greg was a wonderful person, though his later work was a bit captive of trendiness and what almost sounded like promotional writing. But his work in his first collection (Flyboy) is brilliant and insightful and indispensable.
2) Gary Giddins - Gary was a real jerk to me (he basically libeled me in print, a long story) but did some terrific writing. Read, for one example, his essay on Ethel Waters, one of the best things I have ever read. His weakness was pretending at times to have technical musical knowledge (and btw this proves that Justin V, or whatever his name is, unfairly attributed my negativity toward a musician to rejection; Gary's remarks about me were unforgivable, but I am able to separate the personal from the objective).
3) Larry Kart - Larry is also a friend, so there is something of a conflict of interest here, but he is a brilliant writer whose constant insight into a variety of jazz topics is one of the highlights of jazz writing. His work is like little explosions of light, and he is great, also, purely as a writer.
4) Francis Davis - another who has become a friend, but I think he is brilliant and a great writer, full of illuminating perspectives and smart cultural insight. I also love the guy and am personally saddened at his current sickness.
3 minutes ago, Dub Modal said:Congrats on the review. The album in question is excellent as is In the Dark.
thank you.
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11 minutes ago, bresna said:
They do say this:
The first six titles are AAA-mastered from tapes, and the final two are mastered from a hybrid of the highest quality digital and physical masters available, with lacquers cut by Ryan Smith and Barry Grint.
In my experience the American Automobile Association does exquisite sound work.
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7 hours ago, Dmitry said:
Are we to congratulate you, or comfort you? A minus is worse than a plus?
I am told that is about the highest rating one will ever get from Christgau so I am happy with it. Plus he rarely if ever reviews jazz. Promotionally this is very good.
7 hours ago, Dmitry said:Question - does a music critic need to be able to play an instrument, and use the accepted terminology established by centuries of professionals and possible to be descriptive, or will you take their word for what it's worth, when sentences containing things like "sheets of sound", "post-impressionism", "fluid ambiguity", "the innocent vigor of androgyny", "strong", "languid", "apocalyptic" are changing hands?
"it generates a surprisingly compact, uncommonly straightforward, and dare I say pop-friendly sense of identity and purpose"... does this Christgau look at himself in the mirror when he masturbates?
1) Some of the best critics I have read were not actual musicians (Larry Kart on this forum, is actually one of the best critics ever; he needs to be appreciated).
2) I think polls mean nothing until I win one myself. Then they are an affirmation of all that is good in music, a precise and accurate reflection of musical quality and accomplishment.
3) I think reviews mean nothing, until I get a good one. Then they indicate the amazing discretion and insight of the person doing the reviewing.
4) If I ever get a single vote in a Jazz Journalist Association poll I will search the sky for the sight of a pig flying. Especially as I have spent a bit of time of late ridiculing them.
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Robert Christgau:"Allen Lowe and the Constant Sorrow Orchestra: America: The Rough Cut (ESP-Disc) Jazz loyalist, music historian, saxophonist, guitarist, and major cancer survivor Lowe declares that he doesn’t much like today’s music, which he claims lacks “funk” without indicating any familiarity with James Brown, who I assume he knows, or hip-hop, where I assume his education is spotty if that. But this hour of sax-guitar-bass-drums jazz got my attention from spin one. Lowe believes various of its tracks evoke “pre-blues ruminations” or “a post-rational burst of tongues,” “medicine-show irony” or “old-time hillbilly rag.” If so, it does so a little too abstractly or allusively for somebody who continues to find serious as well as pleasurable sustenance in a broad array of today’s musics. But as mere jazz it generates a surprisingly compact, uncommonly straightforward, and dare I say pop-friendly sense of identity and purpose. A MINUS"
my only slight quibble - because Christgau reviews so little jazz and I can't really complain - and, I shouldn't bite a hand that is feeding me - is that James Brown is dead. I probably should have made clearer that I was talking more about jazz and the whitened pop that seems to so dominate the charts, plus the very bland music all over that passes for Americana. But jazz in particular, which talks a lot about the blues but has a very fixed, conservative, narrow and over-qualified sense of what blues and funk is (and funk itself has become pretty formulaic, a repetition of fixed gestures, IMHO).
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11 hours ago, danasgoodstuff said:
You'll be thrilled to know Halvorson won the downbeat critics poll as best guitarist, again. Not TDLR/new star, overall best now working. Not my cuppa, but I'm not going to cast for sturgeons.
One last observation (ha! that'll be the day), saying something is easy to do is weak sauce as criticism. it's reactionary small town music store practice room stuff worthy of the worst elements of Sax on the Web where they think Charlie Parker ruined music. Sure it's easy to do, but it's very hard to do well and I have no more difficulty telling the good from the not so good in free/avant playing than anywhere else, and I love Ben Webster but I'm not convinced he's 'better' than Turrentine. And sometimes participation is more important than ranking/winning, and always broad participation is what makes the best happen and matter.
I get your point but we will have to, as the cliche goes, agree yo disagree. I received the best reviews of my life on the Shipp/Cleaver/Ray thing and I know it was half as good as the esp things I just put out. I know that a lot of players secretly agree with me. I don’t think it’s the same as the Bird question but the SOTW guys are a weird bunch, great on equipment, weak on music. But I have a few projects coming up that will mix both styles so we shall see.
As for guitarists I work with a guy -Ray Suhy - who can do it all with greater substance and feeling.
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On 2/28/2023 at 5:54 PM, JSngry said:
That wasn't a Beatle song.
Are you saying that he was The Secret Shirelle?
did the Shirelle's write it? Did Sinatra write Night and Day? Whoever did it, it was their song.
On 3/1/2023 at 8:42 AM, Justin V said:I'm surprised Allen's post is allowed to stand.
having been molested as a child, I take this sh*t seriously. We had a well-liked board member who ended up in prison for life for this kind of offense, and it threw us all. I actually knew people from this era of jazz and I believe these charges were truthful.
Don Pullen-Milford Graves at Yale: Big Bucks
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Roswell Rudd told me that Shepp was so popular in France that people were naming babies after him,