Dr. Rat

No, I doubt we'll settle the foundation question here. But I don't think it's necessary to answer any absolutely thorough skepticism in order to discuss aesthetics. The question is whether we can find sufficient points of agreement to have a discussion. The trouble with the attitude of "he's got his world, I've got mine and there's no point in discussing it" is that it drastically reduces the importance of music itself. I like pigeons. Other people don't like pigeons. It doesn't matter. I think Coltrane was genius whose work expresses transcendant truths about life. Other people think Coltrane is (and I am) a peurile fraud or a misguided naif. It doesn't matter. These two staements aren't the same. I think music does matter in a way that pigeon fancying does not. We don't need ultimate foundations for the difference to exist, just a level of consensus. --eric

I've posted a couple of old articles by John McDonough (from Downbeat and Wall St. Journal--don't tell them!) on the station message board http://wnmc.org/forum/messagedirectory/9842.htmlColtrane articles. I'm new here, so I don't know if this has been kicked around before, but I am interested in reading what others think about jazz aesthetics. I don't think responses like, say, "John McDonough must be deaf" are particularly interesting, because all you are doing is registering your allegience to the opposite camp--you are just running up the flag. Saying "just listen to the music and you'll see" is equally uninteresting because the other camp can say (and does) precisely the same thing. So, the question is, are there intelligent ways to discuss the issues McDonough brings up? And can we come to a better understanding of what's going on in jazz and what ought to or could be going on in jazz through a discussion like this. My own suspicion is that a lot of jazz fans and even musicians are pretty naive on the subject of aesthetics. What I've heard a lot of is "this is good" or "this is cool" defined strictly on the basis of "what me and my friends have come to identify ourselves with socially." In other words, discussions of musical aesthetics devolve quickly into different camps running up the flag because music is the flag. I'd like to think it can be a lot more than that. Anyhow, if you'd like to give McDonough a read and comment, I'd be interested to read what others have to say, -eric PS. I didn't want to take the responsibility of reposting this copyrighted material here, but if someone else wanted to, I'd say it was fair use, especially if this message board is not searchable by webcrawlers.