Jump to content

The Francis Davis Appreciation Thread


Recommended Posts

and, I disagree that artists suffer from bootlegs - as a matter of fact, the opposite is true - they increase interest in the music, open it up to new audiences, and are ultimately GOOD for artists and the music. Those bottlegs may have been one of the few things that kept jazz alive during the fallow late 1960s -

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 88
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Escept that this bootleg isn't of a live gig, or alternate takes, or anything like that. It's an entire studio session that still might someday be legitimately issued. But that's another matter altogether, and was not a part of my original contention.

But c'mon, dude, shit like this circulates for free amongst good citizens, and has been doing so for years. The real beauty of the Internet ain't in what you can buy, it's about the networks you can form. I still firmly believe in discretion in these matters, and lots of it, as well as believing even more firmly in respecting the wishes and protecting the integrity of one's sources, but, yeah - if FD paid for the unissued Sanders/Cherry Savoy session bootleg, he's a chump. More power to him for doing his part to create interest. etc. since it is truly a groovy little set, but he shouldn't have bought it. No need for that, nor for encouraging others to do the same.

That's got nothing to do with his writing, or his wife, or anything else. It just goes to show that the man needs to cultivate a little deeper realtionship with the Net and the Netizens within. Then he wouldn't be so gaga about paying for shit that he could've, no should've gotten for free, and he would be truly amazed at the treasures that can be had by good citizens everywhere.

And as a side note not relevant to FD whatsomever, but definitely relevant to the topic of bootlegs - you're not a good citizen if you don't buy a legit (meaning full and fair compensation for artists/artists estates) version of previously bootlegged material is issued. As the prophet Dylan said - to live outside the law, you must be honest.

Now, what's this about those bootlegs from the fallow late 1960s? Are you saying that there was an active and lively jazz bootleg market in those days? I sincerely wouod like to hear more about that, because although I know about the various Boris Rose ventures, from the days when he pressed out his shop to his Alto/Sesson/Ozone/etc labels of the late 70s, jazz bootlegs of the late 60s are something I haven't heard too much, if anything about, and I'd like to, as the subject fascinates me. The first Trane bootleg I ever saw was the first live Love Supreme one, ca. 74/75 iirc, and that thing nearly caused me some ruinated drawers....

Edited by JSngry
Link to comment
Share on other sites

oh I see....Francis is a chump and worthy of our ridicule because he is not internet savvy enough to realize that he just paid for something he could have gotten for free - well in that case I'm a bigger chump than anybody because I don't download music from the internet and never have. A true confession there, and it's not from any principle but only because I just never got around to doing it - so I shall resign from this forum and slink away to await the new threads that will hence come to crucify me: the ALLEN LOWE IS INCREDIBLY UNWORTHY OF ORGANISSIMO BECAUSE HE DOESN'T USE THE INTERNET LIKE OTHER ORGANISIMMO POSTERS thread. Come on guys, come on Clementine, this is your opening...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Escept that this bootleg isn't of a live gig, or alternate takes, or anything like that. It's an entire studio session that still might someday be legitimately issued. But that's another matter altogether, and was not a part of my original contention.

But c'mon, dude, shit like this circulates for free amongst good citizens, and has been doing so for years. The real beauty of the Internet ain't in what you can buy, it's about the networks you can form. I still firmly believe in discretion in these matters, and lots of it, as well as believing even more firmly in respecting the wishes and protecting the integrity of one's sources, but, yeah - if FD paid for the unissued Sanders/Cherry Savoy session bootleg, he's a chump. More power to him for doing his part to create interest. etc. since it is truly a groovy little set, but he shouldn't have bought it. No need for that, nor for encouraging others to do the same.

That's got nothing to do with his writing, or his wife, or anything else. It just goes to show that the man needs to cultivate a little deeper realtionship with the Net and the Netizens within. Then he wouldn't be so gaga about paying for shit that he could've, no should've gotten for free, and he would be truly amazed at the treasures that can be had by good citizens everywhere.

Well, we neglect the possibility that for Davis it might be well worth the ten bucks NOT to have to deal with folks like us. Which to me is totally fine. In fact, for a critic, maybe better.

BTW: I'd like to see the list of Clems critics who are not succeptible to the same petty carping, wild ad hominem accusations and other random brickbats he launches against Davis. And, because aesthetics doesn't matter, I wonder how many of these 50 critics have aesthetic sensibilities deeply and significantly opposed to Clem's predilections.

So let's have just one critic, who hates nearly everything that Clem loves and who is impeccible by every standard we can apply to him/her. Should be fun!

--eric

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nobody's saying (well. I'm not, anyway) that FD is worthy of ridicule because of his lack of Netskills, that's absurd. He goofed, period. A goof is a goof, and an act of chumpdom is an act of chumpdom. ("Chump" must be a significantly nastier word in Maine than it is in Texas. Must be the differences in climate...)

Can we have a moment of objectivity (and bad taste) here? Let's say that Screw magazine was still around, and a columnist for that mag published a column about buying the Pamela Anderson/Whatever-his-name-was-rockstar-husband sex tape on the Internet. Well, guess what? THAT was available for free, too, or so I've been told. Don't you think that the more savvy readership of Screw would be justified, in this instance. in calling that columnist a chump? (the matter of anybody and everybody associated with Screw being a chump is besides the point... :g )

Man, I can and will freely admit that Sonny Rollins has made some stinker albums. Why won't you admit that Francis Davis has written some stinker columns? I'm not Clementine, and I myself have got no problem with an overall positive assessment of FD's overall accomplishments, even if I'm not quite as enthusiastic as you are. But c'mon - this column, this specific column, is nothing to be proud of, unless it's turned into a learning experience by his Net-savvy friends spanking him for it and he gets prodded into digging a little deeper into the matter at hand.

Now THERE'S an idea for a column - the world of free concert recordings (aka bootlegs) currently available on the Net. Might take a little time for research and such, but that's a whole lot more, uh, timely and relevant than the one he did write. Gut turning a lemon into lemonade is a time honored tradition, and a mark of true nobility afaic.

And if the issue of the "propriety" in writing publicly about such things is an issue, the question then becomes - why did he write about this one?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

well, if there's a tape of Francis having sex with Tommy Lee, I'd probably download it rather than pay for it - but I think we're talking about music here.

Dr. Rat has a a good idea - but I think we'll need to CONSTRUCT the ideal critic, sort of an inflatable columnist who's anatomically correct (that is, as in left or right handed, sitting at a computer composing pieces) - and than we can program this robot to write columns as re-gurgitated from old Stanley Crouch pieces -

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I recently acquired his big doorstop Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-200. As I was perusing my collection of single volumes to see if the new doorstop superceded them, I noticed that the new volume edits out some of the more caustic remarks he makes in his first book The Sound of Surprise. So, of course, I had to keep that one.

The Sound of Surprise remains my favorite (non-doorstop) Balliet book. I rather wish he wouldn't edit his old articles---reading the original the way it first appeared in print puts me more "in the moment" as it were.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 years later...

FYI...

Wednesday, April 9 | 6pm

Sheets of Sound

with Francis Davis

Kelly Writers House

University of Pennsylvania

3805 Locust Walk

Free Admission

Event Description:

Please join Ars Nova Workshop for a very special event featuring acclaimed writer Francis Davis, who will discuss his work-in-progress "Sheets of Sound". Mr. Davis will read from his highly-anticipated book, and discuss his writing practices, research and challenges while constructing the first major biography of the great saxophonist John Coltrane (1926-67).

Sheets of Sound (the title is the critic Ira Gitler’s phrase for the rush and simultaneity of notes in Coltrane’s solos) will be the first Coltrane biography to give a sense of place in his detailing his childhood and adolescence in High Point, North Carolina (a segregated Southern town founded by Quakers, with no legacy of slavery) and his musical apprenticeship in Philadelphia. It will also be the first to draw extensively from the journals of one of his lovers, an Isabel Archer-type who was his closest confidant for eight years beginning in 1957.

Francis Davis is a Contributing Editor of The Atlantic, a columnist for the Village Voice, and the author of In the Moment (Oxford University Press, 1986), Outcats (OUP, 1990), The History of the Blues (Hyperion, 1995), Bebop and Nothingness (Schirmer, 1996), Like Young (Da Capo, 2001), Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael (Da Capo, 2002), and Jazz and Its Discontents: A Francis Davis Reader (Da Capo, 2004).

Mr. Davis was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993. The following year, he received both a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (for Literary Nonfiction) and a Morroe Berger-Benny Carter Fellowship from the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. In 2001-2, he was a Senior Fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. In 1989, he received a Grammy nomination for his liner notes (co-authored with Martin Williams and Dick Katz) to Jazz Piano, an anthology released by the Smithsonian Collection of Recordings. He has won five ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in music journalism since 1998, most recently in 2007 for “The Singing Epidemic,” an essay published in The Atlantic. Also in 2007, he received an award for Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism from the Jazz Journalists Association, only the ninth writer ever to be so honored.

Explaining how on earth he dropped out of Temple University in 1969, without earning his B.A. in English despite completing honors work in Irish Poetry and Drama, and in Psychoanalysis and Literature, Mr. Davis usually says “It was the ‘60s” and lets it go at that. He has returned to the classroom on numerous occasions since, but always as an instructor or guest lecturer, never as a student. He taught a combined graduate and undergraduate course in Jazz and Blues in the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania in 1995 and ’96. He has read from and spoken about his work, and participated on or moderated panels at Reed College, Columbia University, Yale University, Long Island University-Brooklyn, and his alma mater as well as at Lincoln Center, the Village Vanguard, and the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel. He was plenary speaker at the seventh annual conference of the Modernist Studies Association in Chicago, in 2005.

Mr. Davis has also been active in radio and film, writing scripts for National Public Radio’s Jazz Alive and Jazz Profiles, conducting interviews for the San Francisco-based series City Arts and Lectures, and hosting and producing Interval, a weekly program of jazz criticism, for WHYY-FM (Philadelphia), from 1978 to 1983. He was the jazz critic for the NPR program Fresh Air in 1987. He produced a jazz film festival for the Ritz Five Theater, in Philadelphia, in 1982, and served as Music Consultant for Saxophone Colossus, a 1986 film biography of the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins.

Mr. Davis lives in Philadelphia with his wife, the radio host and producer Terry Gross. He is currently at work on another collection of his profiles and essays, and a biography of the saxophonist and composer John Coltrane, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I recently acquired his big doorstop Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-200. As I was perusing my collection of single volumes to see if the new doorstop superceded them, I noticed that the new volume edits out some of the more caustic remarks he makes in his first book The Sound of Surprise. So, of course, I had to keep that one.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The Sound of Surprise remains my favorite (non-doorstop) Balliet book. I rather wish he wouldn't edit his old articles---reading the original the way it first appeared in print puts me more "in the moment" as it were.

Sorry to be 3 years late with this, Bruce, but I highly recommend getting the Complete New Yorker DVD set, which contains all of Whitney's pieces in their original form. The price for this set has come down considerably, I saw it somewhere for about $50. Besides Whitney's prose there is a wealth of glorious writing (Thurber, Parker, et al), classic cartoons and nostalgic advertising--every page the magazine has printed since 1925.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I recently acquired his big doorstop Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-200. As I was perusing my collection of single volumes to see if the new doorstop superceded them, I noticed that the new volume edits out some of the more caustic remarks he makes in his first book The Sound of Surprise. So, of course, I had to keep that one.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The Sound of Surprise remains my favorite (non-doorstop) Balliet book. I rather wish he wouldn't edit his old articles---reading the original the way it first appeared in print puts me more "in the moment" as it were.

Sorry to be 3 years late with this, Bruce, but I highly recommend getting the Complete New Yorker DVD set, which contains all of Whitney's pieces in their original form. The price for this set has come down considerably, I saw it somewhere for about $50. Besides Whitney's prose there is a wealth of glorious writing (Thurber, Parker, et al), classic cartoons and nostalgic advertising--every page the magazine has printed since 1925.

I've been thinking about it. Sounds like quite an amazing bargain.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.

×
×
  • Create New...