Hard Bop

[Jazzmoose]

I understand Clementine's points.

He has two?

[CJ Shearn]

I read the Rosenthal book a few semesters back for pleasure. Yeah, Igot some factual errors too, but I thought the discussion about Lee Morgan and "badness" to be interesting. This would also be a good book for future members of the Harpur Jazz Project (a group on campus that brings jazz concerts and we try to educate people I'm graduating, so its done for me) who think race hasn't hasn't been a factor in jazz.

[AllenLowe]

Is that Harpur as in Harpur College in Binghamton?

[Kalo]

I recall liking this book when a read it a few years back. Rosenthal covers some (surprisingly) still untrodden territory, at least in book form. (A great anthology could be constructed, however, of already published writings on this era, but no one has done it, to my knowledge.)

I, too, dug Rosenthal's discussion of "Badness," and his relatively extended treatment of the likes of Hill, Morgan, Brooks, and Moncur. The mistakes in the book, especially such things as the continued misspelling of Francis Wolff's name, seem to me to be the fault of the publisher rather than the (deceased) author. If they had just taken each article as it was previously edited and printed, then we would expect to see LESS consistency in such mistakes.

I guess Oxford University Press, publishers of the definitive dictionary of the freakin' English language, can't be bothered to fact check a few names in a lowly jazz book. (Not to take them too much to task; after all, they do publish jazz books in the first place.)

By the way, not to heap any more opprobrium on the head of poor Francis Davis (who I am actually a fan of), but has anyone else noticed that in his book Like Young the name Rahsaan is consistently misspelled as "Rashaan"? That's on the order of the dreaded "Thelonius" instead of "Thelonious." I blame the editors, even if it's originally Davis's mistake.

[Kalo]

And as for that hackneyed quotation, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture," I've seen it attributed to everyone from Ornette Coleman to Frank Zappa to Martin Mull.

Never trust a floating quotation.

It seems to me that dancing about architecture is pretty easy. After all, architecture is about creating inhabitations for the human body in space, while dancing is about inhabiting space utilizing the human body. On the other hand, music, which we all know has its own architecture, translates the rhythms of the human body into sound, substituting moments in time for points in space.

And guess what, people dance in buildings every day to music and other people write about it and nobody is confused by the whole process.

There, I just wrote about dancing AND architecture AND music, and I wasn't even half trying. And if I had a web-cam you would now see me triumphantly cutting a rug about music, architecture, and writing.

And who was it (Goethe?) who said that architecture was frozen music?

I rest my case (Step, shuffle, ball, change...)

[Nate Dorward]

And who was it (Goethe?) who said that architecture was frozen music?

Friedrich von Schelling.

FWIW my experience of OUP-USA's copyediting was that it was godawful. Maybe I got stuck with the same person who did Rosenthal's book.......

[Kalo]

Thanks, Nate, for supplying the correct source for the "frozen architecture" quote.

Of course, any German saw is immediately attributed to Goethe, just as any American bon mot stands to Martin Mull's credit. (As Triumph the Insult Comic Dog would have it: "I keed!")

So you've been edited (or should I say NOT been edited?) by the gremlins at OUP?

Forgive my ignorance, but what was the publication?

[chris]

No, you're describing dancing *in* architecture.

Speaking of floating quotes, the "frozen music" quote is attributed, variously, to Goethe, Schlegel, and Schelling. The latter is correct.

Dancing about architecture is of uncertain lineage. The earliest confirmed citation I've seen actually IS martin mull (in OUI magazine . Though I've seen it attributed to Elvis Costello, Noam Chomsky, and TS Monk amongs many others. It's no wonder, it refers to a very commonly held perception.

[Nate Dorward]

It's not under my name as I just did the annotations--it's Keith Tuma's Anthology of 20th-Century British & Irish Poetry. But the copyediting was so inept that I ended up being de facto copyeditor. All the OUP copyeditor did was (1) put a capital "H" on "he" & "him" in references to God or Jesus Christ; (2) switch "that" & "which" about (the usual fussbudgeting about restrictive & nonrestrictive clauses--something of an irony in a book of British poetry as in Britain this distinction is largely ignored). Everything else was left unchanged, even obvious typos.

[maren]

or: dancing about architecture is OK as long as you don't come too close to the edge of the roof -

(Need that rolling-on-the-floor smilie)

I think I'm gonna have to embroider that on a pillow!!!

[Kalo]

Recently the excellent Dana Stevens, television columnist on Slate.com, resorted to the dreaded "dancing about architecture" quote and linked to this site, which attempts to track down the quote's origins: http://home.pacifier.com/~ascott/they/tamildaa.htm

[Jazz Kat]

What's this book about?

I hope its better than Green's book.