ATR

I think he lost interest in seeing Subject to Change released on CD. BTW, happen to be listening to Before There Was Sound right now. Thanks, Chuck. And thanks to Roscoe Mitchell and the band.

Do these postures translate to his fingers? If you still think so, I suggest you check this out -- recorded live at the Blue Note, NYC in May 2010: http://www.amazon.com/Further-Explorations-Chick-Corea/dp/B004VN7V18/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1321019341&sr=1-1 Again, the music is what matters. Discussion of all else is a waste of bandwidth in cyberspace. Chick is a great musician, check my posts, but and he does have freedom to believe anything he wants. But is scientology a religion? More of a cult, according to what I read. You seem to be missing the point of my post. Are you saying that if it's a cult, and not a religion, that he doesn't have the freedom to follow it as he wishes? Does he seem the worse for wear? Does he need saving from the cult, as an impressionable child might? Is this really so different than any other of your jazz heroes deciding mid-life to become muslim? And even if it is, who really cares? Anyone here is free to NOT buy his new music. To just drone on and on about some insignificant facet of his life is just plain ignorant and WRONG! ATR was hardly droning on about it and merely posited that Scientology may not be a religion. In fact, several nations still don't recognize that Scientology is a religion and the US government is forever trying to define it as a methodology, not a religion, and get some tax monies. I spent several years living in a rented house with Scientologists, and several additional years involved musically with a guitarist and song-writer who was a Scientologist, and from that viewpoint I don't really see Dianetics and Scientology as a religion but at its best as an alternative to psychiatry. For many of its adherents it starts out as a sort of self-improvement therapy series and then can become something else with further involvement. Its biggest enemy (in its own estimation) is the psychiatric community and accepted psychology; Scientologists believe they have the new/old truth in this field and should have the place of privilege and rank. They've gone another route instead. I DO think that Scientology informs Corea's work, but agree with John that it's hardly different than the way that other belief systems or methodologies (or lack of same) have influenced the work of other jazz artists. The fact that I called it a religion was NOT the point of my post. I could have just as easily called it 'shit', and it still would not matter. I know that ATR produces jazz records. That does NOT make him more informed about anything other than producing jazz records than you or I. You treat me like that and you expect me to put Subject to Change on CD for you?

Chick is a great musician, check my posts, but and he does have freedom to believe anything he wants. But is scientology a religion? More of a cult, according to what I read.

I finally did decide to upgrade my LP copy of this album, seeing as how I would also be getting The Hard Blues as a bonus. I can't say enough good things about Hemphill. I just spent the day listening to the two duet CD's with Wadud, the duo Chile New York with Warren Smith, and the WSQ recordings Revue and Live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Seeing him play Roi Boye and the Gotham Minstrels in person at The Tin Palace was unforgettable. I traded him snapshots of it for a copy of Blue Boye. My reel to reel dub of his WBAI performance (12/04/76) of Roi Boye is still playable, I think. Haven't listened to it in a while. It seems like he was underrecorded, yet there are so many touchstone albums. Buster Bee with Lake, Raw Materials and Residuals with Wadud and Moye. He was thoughtful and deliberate in his speech and his playing. A giant in every way. I was lucky to be in New York at the same time he was.

http://deeplistening.org/site/releasesby/Dempster Live in the Great Abbey is a stone classic. Not jazz, but improvised. Check it out. That George Lewis recording for Sackville sets the bar pretty high, too.

Maybe it's profound in a Scientology context. I've always attributed his comments about putting communication with an audience above all else to his involvement with Scientology, but I don't know enough about Scientology to know why it would relate. It's too simple to say he wanted to make a lot of money and give it to the church. Or keep it himself. Jazz is not a high paying gig, after all. What's odd is the remark about executions. I think it's true that if we were forced to watch them there would be more opposition to the death penalty, which is what I hope he's saying. But why bring it up in the context of musical performance? Seems to be a non sequitur. Anyway, Chick is a great musician and if you don't like the music he played before, with, and right after Miles I just don't know what to tell you. Yeah, I don't listen to him much anymore either. That's my problem, not Chick's.

I have all those on Time/Mainstream LPs and the music is great. Definitely worth picking up. I will put these on a wish list somewhere and pick up a few with my anticipated birthday and holiday gift credits. Would have recommended the Cage 25 Year Retrospective box set, but it covers more than 10 years. Best album cover and design ever, maybe. Questioning why I left out the AACM. Numbers 1&2 and Three Compositions of New Jazz are both from the decade under consideration. A mistake to leave them out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Eye_and_Ear_Control There's always a problem when you try to limit the discussion to a particular period of time. Human creativity doesn't work that way. The rock bands mentioned make me laugh. Rock is just never avant garde to me, unless it's The Beatles, Bob Dylan, or The Beach Boys. Most everything else, even Frank Zappa, is appropriated from classical music and jazz. Psychedelic? Sure, whatever that means. Avant garde? No. Not saying I don't enjoy listening to it, though.

Morton Feldman Karheinz Stockhausen John Cage Luciano Berio Cecil Taylor Albert Ayler Sun Ra Ornette Coleman Pierre Boulez Elliot Carter George Crumb Terry Riley LaMonte Young Those are who I would call the usual suspects. If there is an avant garde of rock music, I guess it would be AMM. Rock is pretty much by definition a popular and commercial music. As a matter of fact, John Cage told me jazz is popular music. I hardly know what these labels mean any more other than what the person using them says they mean.

I've been contemplating whether to get these 6 3XCD sets from the Wergo label for some time now. This was the avant garde of the 60's. Everyone is pretty much represented. http://www.jazzloft.com/p-50769-earle-brown-contemporary-sound-series-vol-1.aspx

Good point - I was saying something like this before. In that whole period a lot of US music was issued outside the US, and you're right, the course of jazz at that time must have seemed different with only limited access to the numerous European issues from various labels, but most notably in terms of any kind of modern jazz (whatver that means), these BS/SN issues. In truth, few of these titles (as a proportion of the many issued) have ever settled down to seem like classics to me, but if you consider the chunks of material from that have been boxed so far and bear in mind that there will be some more to come... also things that might not get boxed: early Tim Berne, some Glenn Spearman, Hemphill/Bowie/Mitchell/Abrams/Jarman?(Wadada)Smith, Frank Lowe, John Carter, and lots more really. A big box pulling together all the Chicago stuff would be great. If you lived in the NYC area at the time your perspective would have been skewed in exactly the opposite direction. At the time these came out they were in all the NYC record stores and the music was happening live every night and most afternoons too. I'm sure there are a lot of personal favorites people have, and one listener's 'classic' is another's 'so what'. FWIW, I think the label did get a bit diluted over the years but I can't do without the WSQ albums, Cecil and Max at McMillan Theatre, Beaver Harris In:Sanity, several of those Murray Octets but particularly Ming, Andrew Hill's Strange Serenade, Hemphill's Raw Materials and Residuals, and in general anything that had producer Giacomo Pelliciotti's name on it.

Hemphill covered it all the time himself. It's on a trio CD with Wadud and Joe Bonadio on Music&Arts. The title tune is catchy, but for those who have never heard the album both RItes and The Painter are even, IMO, better. So let's get this straight, the new version will include The Hard Blues? What about the other Mbari releases, particularly Blue Boye which is a personal favorite.

I've always been curious as to why Sun Ra's music appeals to rock fans who are otherwise cold to the vast majority of avant garde jazz. I guess it's the George Clinton/Phish/Grateful Dead/Fela jamminess thing that the Arkestra gets into. Used to play poker with this guy who had something like 50 Sun Ra albums and no other jazz in his collection to speak of.

Sad news. I saw Billy Bang perform many times, mostly in the 70's and 80's in NYC. His recording Outline No. 12, which I see is available on CD done by Charly Records, is a little known gem featuring Sunny Murray, Frank Lowe, David Murray, and Charles Tyler in a large ensemble. Very ambitious music. I had the pleasure of recording him when he was in Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society for the Eye on You album. He managed to cut through two electric guitarists, electric bass, and two saxophones quite nicely. He dealt with his trauma and turned it into beautiful music. Can't ask for anything more, in my opinion. I hope he went without pain and in peace, as he deserved.

After The Royal Scam the band pretty much became Fagen, Becker, and a rotating cast of jazz session musicians and ringers. Becker and Fagen produced Apogee, a Warne Marsh Pete Christlieb straight up jazz album I've never actually heard. They truly love jazz, but I believe the influence was the other way around, and they were better playing their knowing brand of rock filled with insider references and allusions than what I call Weather Report with clever lyrics. Of course, the only way to find out how the influence goes is to ask the musician. I took some friends who knew next to nothing about jazz to a Don Cherry concert in the 70's, and one of them announced afterward that he was 'obviously influenced by Stevie Wonder'. Well who knows? Cherry knew everything. I think there was an official court decision about using the Keith Jarrett riff from Belonging, but I don't know if the Horace SIlver borrowing went to court. I see here that they got some people to listen to jazz, which is always a good thing. I look at the situation in the same way as the Joni Mitchell Mingus record. If it got a few people to turn on to Mingus, which is probably why he did it, then it worked. You have to remember that most Hoffman forum members came to jazz from rock, and they came recently.

Nessa is right. And I find that as I get older I laugh at questions like this more often than not. What can you say beyond 'I can only deal with the music I have heard'? Only that a lot of the stuff I read about music turns out I don't agree with when I actually hear it and the effort I spent trying to get the recording seems, well, wasted.

Clear Spot must have been playing non-stop in my friends' dorm room for months after it came out, even though Maury said it was a sell-out and oddly commercial compared to Safe As Milk, which at the time I had never heard. The guy was on to something. He even plugged Ornette's Science FIction album the first time I saw him live, and it wasn't on 'his' label. He had a way with words, and the musical onomatopoeia of tunes like Click Clack as well as his inspired use of the vibraphone in his band really got my attention. I hear he was difficult, but he presented himself as a gentle person trying to avoid being damaged by a hostile world. I can identify with that.

Only 8 years? Threadgills' been doing this much longer than that, and IMO that's how long it took him to get to where he is. If I can't listen to something without having to compare it with something else, I figure I'm not in the mood to really listen to it. All those old arguments about composed music having some kind of innate superiority are lost on me. I love the story in 4 Lives in Bebop about CT reading some scores and being very impressed, but not enjoying the music when it was actually played in concert. Refresh my memory, was it Boulez? Well, it's good for musicians to be competitive even if there's no valid way to determine who 'won'.

So - when is Subject To Change going to be reissued on CD? Good question. There is no date for a CD issue. A digital issue will likely appear on ITunes before it does on CD. Do you have the LP?

The third Sextet album, Subject to Change, available on LP only from Cadence. Recorded live to two track. The brass section for that album was Ray Anderson and Rasul Siddik, with the same strings and percussion as Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket. The record was overlooked a bit but it made several top ten lists for the year. I know it's one of Threadgill's personal favorites, at least of the records made with the Sextet. All of the About Time Threadgill Sextet albums are available from Cadence, and the first two are on ITunes and CD.

Visually, equalled only by Art Ensemble of Chicago of all the contemporary jazz bands from the 60's onward. Well, Sun Ra is up there as well. If you never saw them live, you really missed out on a lot of the fun but they made some stunning recordings as well. I first saw the Kollektief in a church on the campus of Tufts University in Medford, MA back in the early 80's, and was so knocked out that I had to sign them up to record on that very tour. Breuker's personal collection of recordings is legendary. A great man, a great band/family.

His contribution to the film Imagine the Sound was eye and ear opening. A remarkable person and musician.

I suggest Down to the Wire and The Marmalade King on Hat. Not recent stuff, but good examples of his work. After all, he is an old dog. As for this box, it sounds like the format is much the same as the Clean Feed box with Joe Morris. Four duets, each about an hour long. Completely improvised. The difference is in the relationships. Morris didn't have much history, if any, of playing with Braxton whereas Hemingway did.

Not me.

Now that's just silly. He played in Circle and the Braxton group of that time with Braxton and Altschul. Plus a bunch of albums with Rivers. This is the kind of music he was playing at the time. Certainly his writing at the time of Conference Of The Birds is a bit different than what he was composing later. Isn't that the entire point with the people who don't care for what Holland is doing now? That it's so much less improvisatory, interactive, and imaginative than what he was playing in the 60's, 70's, and even 80's?