umum_cypher

Many happy returns Guy! Tom

I haven't seen it, but I very much doubt this is the whole story. Tony Whyton has interesting things to say.

From memory I think they married in Monaco around August 1976, when they returned from their last trip to Africa. There's a 20,000 word chapter on Wilen in the book on jazz in post-war France I've just finished writing.

Barney Wilen - Zodiac SME - Karyobin The second one is maybe more fluttery than serene. Actually the first one isn't serene as such. But melodic and spare, certainly.

AMM is the opposite of Marlowe Morris. Zizek is not really the opposite of Hobsbawm, I don't think. I care about one and am interested in the other, but I couldn't say on your behalf.

I don't think either of them would be that thrilled with the comparison. But you might be right, I don't think that a thinker like Hobsbawm (or any of the other historians with high profiles in the 50s-60s) would get very far today without a Zizekian schtick attached (much as I enjoy that schtick, I should say). Too difficult by half, and too patrician. Hobsbawm was very down on intellectualist jazz, like other Marxist critics. There's a review of AMM from the late-60s which is very rude about their avant-gardeism. But there's also a really good little book, derived from a 1990s lecture, on the 20th century avant-gardes.

Hobsbawm, AKA Francis Newton, died this morning. The Guardian

True. But if they ever start Amazon Local, like the UK arm, it'll get even worse. I'm waking up every day to 3 or 4 overnight emails offering me deals on nearby dentists or - no kidding - 'etiquette workshops' (The London School of Etiquette, £89, down from £110). They know their customers' needs, I'll give them that.

Belated thanks, chaps - we went to the Paralympics on my birthday and I was thrilled to find I had the chance to boo George Osborne! What a present! Edit: thinking about this - if there was a dedicated politician-booing stadium event every week, wouldn't you go? And pay handsomely to do so? I think there is a business opportunity here.

In the British case in the time period you mention, not many. More the case now (but I suspect that's equally true in the USA). Again, and in the time period you mention, most. Lots came up through dance bands, amateur trad/skiffle bands; some played in radio orchestras. By the 60s/70s many were getting their grounding in blues bands (McLaughlin for example) and later still many started in rock. Today's younger performers are far more likely to come up via academic training though that is not always classical and I can't say the classical training is what I hear first and foremost in most players. It does sound different to American jazz, even contemporary American jazz, but that is more due to the different environment and a very conscious effort by many musicians since the 60s (not all) not to sound American. I'd imagine something similar is true of other non-US countries with a strong internal jazz tradition.

Agreed on both counts. Solal certainly doesn't sound like Long or the others, not least because of what he's playing, but behind all Solal's verbiage I hear a kind of centred touch there which is different to even the most "technical" of mid-century US players', I think. I have some passages from the Gaveau recordings in mind, I'll look them up when I get home from holiday (actually I'm in France. It's hot as hell, and the locals are getting impish). The point further up about classical vs eg army training is interesting, and there's surely something in it - but again, maybe not too much. Long taught René Urtreger for a while, and there's not a lot that's "perlé" about his touch, which I find quite bruising in the 50s. Re Gershwin - that's my point. Solal isn't just fitting into a pre-existing mould of Frenchness (and there are attempts to do that - André Hodeir's music makes an extended effort to occupy the Debussian tradition). In his working with all kinds of incoming and pre-existant material and influences, Solal like everyone else is part of the process of defining what Frenchness is at the time. Music isn't reflecting that local identity, it is that identity. The same could be said for Herbie, from the other side of the fence, but with the French classical tradition still very much a point of reference.

I stand corrected.

If you wanted to play the lineage game (and it's a mug's game for the most part) you could identify, in pretty much concrete terms, the things that Herbie shares with impressionist French antecedents. "Impish and feline" isn't going to get more concrete than that.

I remember reading an interview with Herbie - 10 years ago maybe? - in which he talked, I think, about going to the Czech republic and being asked about Czech jazz. No such thing, he said, jazz is American: you can be Czech like Miroslav Vitous and play jazz, but that's it. Google's no help. Anyone remember this? A long shot, I know. It's for a piece I'm writing. Thanks!

Mark, email the Darmstadt Jazz Institut and ask them for their Thad Jones bibliography. The article/issue will almost certainly be listed. Then, you can order a scan from them for a few Euros. The Jazz Institut is brilliantly run, and endlessly useful. Re: Bartok's values, from the *1942* essay Race Purity in Music: "Racial impurity … is definitely beneficial … A complete separation from foreign influences means stagnation: well assimilated foreign impulses offer processes of enrichment". Good old Bela.

Bad news. Good news! Did Barney's music get used for La Jetée though? I don't remember there being any jazz.

In my review of Kelley’s Monk book (link) I said that I liked the bits that Freelancer’s Aged White Male biographer would likely not have included (BTW that’s a stereotype I’m not fond of, but it’s a stereotype for a reason I suppose). The networks of community care and responsibility are delved into very deeply, and those things seem really valuable to me in telling Monk’s story. Not sure if Kelley concentrates on them because he’s African American or because he’s a social historian, a bit of both I imagine, but one way or the other he did. Neither am I sure that the AWM biographer would necessarily not look into them (I know he does sometimes!) I think the main issue with the Sharony book is in the distinction between history and memory. The historian Pierre Nora wrote a lot about this and started off a school of writing on the subject. He describes history as an official, supposedly objective record and interpretation of events, whereas memory is an “unofficial” narrative that tries to keep a kind of lived experience alive, and usually has special (sometimes oppositional) meaning for a certain community. She doesn’t use those terms, but Sharony explicitly frames her book as memory. I suppose Lewis Porter explicitly frames his Coltrane book(s) as history. Readers looking for one will always be disappointed with the other, but neither is just right or wrong, good or bad (that doesn't mean they can't be done well or badly of course...) BTW, having workeded with it quite a lot, I’d say both the problem and the attractiveness of oral history is that it’s always somewhere between the two.

I thought this was going to be the best line in the article: But then I read this one:

I recently read a really interesting piece by Forrester on Hodeir's Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence in a 1956 issue of Jazz Monthly. Unlike most reviews of that book, this article is full of a combative, take-no-prisoners, dose-of-common-sense attitude. (I don't agree with it all, but it's a very strong and stylistically slightly strange critical voice). I've never heard of Forrester, and - seeing as he shares a name with a Southern Syncopated Orchestra trombonist - I wonder if he was writing pseudonymously. Has anyone read any other pieces? And does anyone know if that was his real name, or anything else about him?