Verve's CEO

[Guest]

Verve is important because it is a part of a major firm, but a semi-autonomous part, as are Blue Note and Atlantic. All are connected through their respective catalogues to a tradition of entrepreneurial experiment; and note that it's a tradition that made money - these are not catalogues of losers. If there were an opportunity for some serious attempt to change the market, it seems to me that it can really only come from them.

Verve is trying to change the market. that's what they've been doing in collab with Scofield. it's just that i don't think it will work. ( although i also think that as far as sounds with a beat go, guys like Sco can make it into real music better than anyone. )

gotta repeat myself: until jazz once again positions itself as the musical vanguard of the underground of social protest it's not going anywhere.

kids today live in virtual worlds. there's are some major pros to that, but the big con is that they can be manipulated more easily than ever. i predict a serious counter-revolution to the "virtual life". jazz-derived musics could frontline this counterevolution ...

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Verve is important because it is a part of a major firm, but a semi-autonomous part, as are Blue Note and Atlantic. All are connected through their respective catalogues to a tradition of entrepreneurial experiment; and note that it's a tradition that made money - these are not catalogues of losers. If there were an opportunity for some serious attempt to change the market, it seems to me that it can really only come from them.

Verve is trying to change the market. that's what they've been doing in collab with Scofield. it's just that i don't think it will work. ( although i also think that as far as sounds with a beat go, guys like Sco can make it into real music better than anyone. )

gotta repeat myself: until jazz once again positions itself as the musical vanguard of the underground of social protest it's not going anywhere.

kids today live in virtual worlds. there's are some major pros to that, but the big con is that they can be manipulated more easily than ever. i predict a serious counter-revolution to the "virtual life". jazz-derived musics could frontline this counterevolution ...

The record companies can't, of course, do it without musicians who are on speaking terms with what the culture needs at any particular time. But even with the right musicians with the right aims, these divisions can only do it if they have the will to exercise their own initiative.

MG

[JSngry]

I think I had fewer and lower expectations in the past, so I'm not terribly worried about what people think of music now. In my experience, few young people in the late '50s/early '60s were concerned about music as an experience; most were content for music to be the soundtrack of their lives. Were it not so, there would be no nostalgia market and, as we all know, nostalgia has been a huge force in people's "appreciation" of music (and many other things) for so long no one can tell how long.

Of course, there are no comparative statistics to show what proportion of the population thinks of music as anything other than a background, and whether this changes over time, but I get a distinct impression from talking to young people when I was at work, and even younger ones now I'm retired, that things are no worse now than they were four decades ago; and probably at all times since the beginnings of the popularity of radio.

I'll agree with you as far as "the masses" go. What I'm talking about is a decline of what we might refer to as "serious music fans", which have always been a minority of the population. More and more, I see people who intellectually and tempermentally "fit the mold" of being the type of person who could get into music on a deeper level than the superficial, and they're...just not interested. They have other interests, other fascinations, other things on their mind, and getting into music on a "serious" level just ain't one of them.

We can blame the lack of quality product that might entice them, or we can blame the easy access and constant portability of stuff that they already know that they want to have on hand, or we can blame the stranglehold on the media markets that the corporate entities have, or we can blame all of that (and more), but the point remains (at least from where I sit) - a lot of the people who "should" be interested in exploring music in even semi-depth aren't. And don't want to be. Because where there's a will, there's almost always a way. But if there ain't no will in the first place, whatcha' gonna do 'bout that?

[JSngry]

Anybody heard from johnagrandy lately?

[.:.impossible]

You know, reading baltostar's comments, I thought it was johnagrandy! I honestly didn't look at the username until you just said that.

I'd like to know more about this virtual counter-revolution. Are you talking about a mass rejection to all things media in an exponentially increasing media-centric world?

Is this what RRK & Co. attempted to prevent by ramsacking the tv set?

Neil Young, from "Union Man"

This meeting will now come to order

Is there any new business?

Yeah, I think 'Live music are better'

Bumper stickers should be issued.

What was that?

'Live music is better' bumper stickers

Should be issued

The gentleman says

'Live music is better' bumper stickers

Should be issued

All in favor of what he said

Signify by sayin' "ay"

Ay!

AY!

Edited April 25, 2006 by .:.impossible

[Joe M]

Jazz or no jazz, the working musicians I know have a hard time finding a "listening audience" anywhere. Either its dinner music in the background, or everyone is getting wasted and the music is in the background. Either way, the pay is the same. Ain't shit.

Of course there are exceptions, but I've had multiple conversations about this with different people over the past six months.

What do some of you performing musicians feel? How has this changed over the past 35 years?

This is a very broad generalization, but I feel that "society" today has lost most, if not all, of its sensitivity to music as a distinct medium that is best enjoyed with a distinct set of engagement skills. It's just become another "lifestyle accessory", and with things like access to "product" and portability at an all-time high, there's really no need for the average Joe to even be aware that he might want to be curious about something "different", or that he might actually "get something out of" what is traditionally refered to as "serious listening'. Such has always been the case to one degree or another, but I have noticed a marked increase in these tendencies among otherwise intellegent people over the last 5 years or so. How are things in your town?

Ours has become a society of total portability and having everything "on demand". The technology itself is beautiful, but if you leave a 50 lb. bag of dog food open and available to a dog, it'll try to eat it as quickly as possible instead of rationing it out. I see lots of people doing the same thing with technology, and they're being relentlessly encouraged to do so. Myself, I think that it's a diversionary tactic to keep people from sitting still in one place for too long, because when you do that, you might actually slow down, sit still, and take stock. That's breeding grounds for upsetting the apple cart right there and we can't have that now, can we.

I guess what I'm saying is that music (of all kinds) doesn't "matter" to as many people as it used to. The "functionality" of music in general is changing. Jazz, once, always, and forever being a type of music that has personal communication as/at its core, can't help but suffer as a result. The challenge is rapidly becoming not how to get people interested in listening to this music, it's becoming how to convince people that listening, really listening, to any kind of music as anything other than a soundtrack to their lifestyle might be worth their while.

I'm not optimistic about the chances for success right now, not on a scale large enough to really matter to society as a whole, but the one potential outlet for subversiveness might be in the electronica/ambient (and related) field, where you can at least create the illusion of passivity and non-confrontationality. And we all know that the key to successful subversion is the creation of a successful illusion, a "front". Thing is, I'm at an age and of a background where playing music that way is kinda counter-intuitive. So that makes me sorta useless. Oh well. At least I can watch and cheer from the sidelines, and come out of my cave whenever asked.

Things could be worse. Yeah, sure.

I think I had fewer and lower expectations in the past, so I'm not terribly worried about what people think of music now. In my experience, few young people in the late '50s/early '60s were concerned about music as an experience; most were content for music to be the soundtrack of their lives. Were it not so, there would be no nostalgia market and, as we all know, nostalgia has been a huge force in people's "appreciation" of music (and many other things) for so long no one can tell how long.

Of course, there are no comparative statistics to show what proportion of the population thinks of music as anything other than a background, and whether this changes over time, but I get a distinct impression from talking to young people when I was at work, and even younger ones now I'm retired, that things are no worse now than they were four decades ago; and probably at all times since the beginnings of the popularity of radio.

That's as far as the people are concerned. As far as the record industry is concerned, the majors seem to have learned how to control the market a lot better than they could forty, fifty, sixty years ago. That leaves much less opportunity for small firms to break through with something new. And, since everything new for the past sixty odd years has been brought about by small firms, it seems to me that that is where the problem lies.

Verve is important because it is a part of a major firm, but a semi-autonomous part, as are Blue Note and Atlantic. All are connected through their respective catalogues to a tradition of entrepreneurial experiment; and note that it's a tradition that made money - these are not catalogues of losers. If there were an opportunity for some serious attempt to change the market, it seems to me that it can really only come from them.

MG

Small firms have a much better chance of having success today than 40 years ago. Maybe not getting a Top 40 hit, but you mean to tell me it's tougher today, in this age of internet downloads, Myspace, ArtistShare, and the proliferation of artist run labels to get your music, in your vision out in front of people. The whole idea of a "record company" is obsolete, 20th century thinking. The major labels are dinosaurs, and that's why they're on their last legs.

Verve and Blue Note are no more "semi-autonomous" than any other divisions of the majors, they all have to turn a profit. By in large their catalogs were bought, not home grown, so that entrepreneurial spirit is not alive and never was alive in these corporations when it comes to jazz. That's why today's small labels are the heirs to the throne of Granz and Lion and Wolff, not Golstein and co.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Jazz or no jazz, the working musicians I know have a hard time finding a "listening audience" anywhere. Either its dinner music in the background, or everyone is getting wasted and the music is in the background. Either way, the pay is the same. Ain't shit.

Of course there are exceptions, but I've had multiple conversations about this with different people over the past six months.

What do some of you performing musicians feel? How has this changed over the past 35 years?

This is a very broad generalization, but I feel that "society" today has lost most, if not all, of its sensitivity to music as a distinct medium that is best enjoyed with a distinct set of engagement skills. It's just become another "lifestyle accessory", and with things like access to "product" and portability at an all-time high, there's really no need for the average Joe to even be aware that he might want to be curious about something "different", or that he might actually "get something out of" what is traditionally refered to as "serious listening'. Such has always been the case to one degree or another, but I have noticed a marked increase in these tendencies among otherwise intellegent people over the last 5 years or so. How are things in your town?

Ours has become a society of total portability and having everything "on demand". The technology itself is beautiful, but if you leave a 50 lb. bag of dog food open and available to a dog, it'll try to eat it as quickly as possible instead of rationing it out. I see lots of people doing the same thing with technology, and they're being relentlessly encouraged to do so. Myself, I think that it's a diversionary tactic to keep people from sitting still in one place for too long, because when you do that, you might actually slow down, sit still, and take stock. That's breeding grounds for upsetting the apple cart right there and we can't have that now, can we.

I guess what I'm saying is that music (of all kinds) doesn't "matter" to as many people as it used to. The "functionality" of music in general is changing. Jazz, once, always, and forever being a type of music that has personal communication as/at its core, can't help but suffer as a result. The challenge is rapidly becoming not how to get people interested in listening to this music, it's becoming how to convince people that listening, really listening, to any kind of music as anything other than a soundtrack to their lifestyle might be worth their while.

I'm not optimistic about the chances for success right now, not on a scale large enough to really matter to society as a whole, but the one potential outlet for subversiveness might be in the electronica/ambient (and related) field, where you can at least create the illusion of passivity and non-confrontationality. And we all know that the key to successful subversion is the creation of a successful illusion, a "front". Thing is, I'm at an age and of a background where playing music that way is kinda counter-intuitive. So that makes me sorta useless. Oh well. At least I can watch and cheer from the sidelines, and come out of my cave whenever asked.

Things could be worse. Yeah, sure.

I think I had fewer and lower expectations in the past, so I'm not terribly worried about what people think of music now. In my experience, few young people in the late '50s/early '60s were concerned about music as an experience; most were content for music to be the soundtrack of their lives. Were it not so, there would be no nostalgia market and, as we all know, nostalgia has been a huge force in people's "appreciation" of music (and many other things) for so long no one can tell how long.

Of course, there are no comparative statistics to show what proportion of the population thinks of music as anything other than a background, and whether this changes over time, but I get a distinct impression from talking to young people when I was at work, and even younger ones now I'm retired, that things are no worse now than they were four decades ago; and probably at all times since the beginnings of the popularity of radio.

That's as far as the people are concerned. As far as the record industry is concerned, the majors seem to have learned how to control the market a lot better than they could forty, fifty, sixty years ago. That leaves much less opportunity for small firms to break through with something new. And, since everything new for the past sixty odd years has been brought about by small firms, it seems to me that that is where the problem lies.

Verve is important because it is a part of a major firm, but a semi-autonomous part, as are Blue Note and Atlantic. All are connected through their respective catalogues to a tradition of entrepreneurial experiment; and note that it's a tradition that made money - these are not catalogues of losers. If there were an opportunity for some serious attempt to change the market, it seems to me that it can really only come from them.

MG

Small firms have a much better chance of having success today than 40 years ago. Maybe not getting a Top 40 hit, but you mean to tell me it's tougher today, in this age of internet downloads, Myspace, ArtistShare, and the proliferation of artist run labels to get your music, in your vision out in front of people. The whole idea of a "record company" is obsolete, 20th century thinking. The major labels are dinosaurs, and that's why they're on their last legs.

Verve and Blue Note are no more "semi-autonomous" than any other divisions of the majors, they all have to turn a profit. By in large their catalogs were bought, not home grown, so that entrepreneurial spirit is not alive and never was alive in these corporations when it comes to jazz. That's why today's small labels are the heirs to the throne of Granz and Lion and Wolff, not Golstein and co.

I agree that HighNote, Blues Leaf and other independent labels are the heirs of the old ones. But whereas Blue Note, Pacific Jazz, Riverside, Prestige, Verve, Cadet/Argo were able to produce a fairly continuous string of chart successes in their day, the current crop aren't. Joe Fields has been making good solid jazz albums since about 1971 - I guess he's released 700-800 - and a lot of those are as good and commercial as the best and most commercial of the product of those older labels. But out of all these releases on Cobblestone, Muse, HighNote and Savant, there's only been one that hit the R&B charts and none that hit the pop charts (at least up to 2001 - not quite up to date on this). I think the same is true for other jazz labels.

I don't think it's the fault of the owners of these labels; as I posted earlier, I think the majors are much better nowadays at controlling what's getting on the charts - and that's what's making the (air)waves, of course. So I don't think Joe Fields has an earthly of pushing jazz of any kind into a significant position.

Of course, the newer independents can make a profit. The older ones did, too, even without the hit records. Those entrepreneurs were taking risks but only small ones, because they understood that the core market for jazz comprised a relatively small number of people who, fortunately for these firms, happened to buy a lot of records, each. And that hasn't changed. So a firm that controls its costs well and concentrates on making good product and making sure that market knows about it can provide a good living for the owners of these firms. Good. But they aren't going to change anything.

MG

Edited April 25, 2006 by The Magnificent Goldberg

[Joe M]

Ok, true, no High Note releases have made the Top 40. But how many instrumental jazz artists on MAJOR labels have? One. Chris Botti. And that tells you something (not that I'm saying Chris is a bad musician, I'd rather see him on that chart than Kenny G). But you're living in fantasy land if you think that if Verve would only sign Dave Holland or Vijay Iyer that they would be in the Top 40, or even close!

Also, for everyone lamenting that Verve isn't into doing "real" jazz anymore - please don't complain the next time a major label tells an artist that they have to change their sound, or record a certain tune, to be more commercially friendly, or screws over an artist financially. You want it both ways (record companies to spend big bucks, AND be totally hands off). It doesn't work that way. I hear young artists (kids) talking about how they want to "set signed by a major" and all they're really asking for is to get screwed.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Ok, true, no High Note releases have made the Top 40. But how many instrumental jazz artists on MAJOR labels have? One. Chris Botti. And that tells you something (not that I'm saying Chris is a bad musician, I'd rather see him on that chart than Kenny G). But you're living in fantasy land if you think that if Verve would only sign Dave Holland or Vijay Iyer that they would be in the Top 40, or even close!

Also, for everyone lamenting that Verve isn't into doing "real" jazz anymore - please don't complain the next time a major label tells an artist that they have to change their sound, or record a certain tune, to be more commercially friendly, or screws over an artist financially. You want it both ways (record companies to spend big bucks, AND be totally hands off). It doesn't work that way. I hear young artists (kids) talking about how they want to "set signed by a major" and all they're really asking for is to get screwed.

Hm, I wasn't talking about the top 40. No Cobblestone, Muse, HighNote or Savant albums have made the top 200, and only one has made the top 100 R&B. But you're quite right about the top 40. Excepting vocals, Botti & G - and Christmas records - the last instrumental jazz album (I think it was instrumental, I don't know it) I can find on the pop top 40 was Earl Klugh's "Low ride" in 1983.

And I DO agree with you that signing for a major is not likely to be productive for most artists, for the reasons you adduce. I think I posted something to this effect earlier in this thread, or it may have been a different thread. While that's true for most artists; there's always the possibility that the type of person who would be needed to really push things along won't be the same as "most artists". In fact, I'd guess that one is looking for a fairly extraordinary person. Such people do come along, once in a blue moon.

MG

[Simon Weil]

I think I had fewer and lower expectations in the past, so I'm not terribly worried about what people think of music now. In my experience, few young people in the late '50s/early '60s were concerned about music as an experience; most were content for music to be the soundtrack of their lives. Were it not so, there would be no nostalgia market and, as we all know, nostalgia has been a huge force in people's "appreciation" of music (and many other things) for so long no one can tell how long.

"Nostalgia never goes out of fashion". I mean if Eve hadn't eaten that apple of Free and Fusion forbidden knowledge we never would have gotten kicked out of Eden/Blues and Swinging Heaven.

Oh, wimper, weep, sad, sad, sad. Bleet, bleet, bleet, bleet, bleet.

Simon Weil

Edited April 26, 2006 by Simon Weil

[neveronfriday]

kids today live in virtual worlds. there's are some major pros to that, but the big con is that they can be manipulated more easily than ever. i predict a serious counter-revolution to the "virtual life". jazz-derived musics could frontline this counterevolution ...

Probably not what you had in mind, and certainly not earth-shakingly new, but in context I thought these findings here were quite interesting:

Teens embrace vintage vinyl, resist corporate control of music industry

Listening to records - the old-fashioned vinyl discs long believed to have been made obsolete by CDs and music downloading — is a form of resistance against the music industry’s corporate taste-makers for many young people, according to new research from David Hayes, a PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute >for Studies in Education of U of T.

His thesis, entitled Making Music Meaningful: Youth Investment in Popular Music, focused on how young people in the pseudonymous town of Mapleville, Ont., gleaned meaning from popular music and how their choice of music helped them navigate gender and racial identities.

While conducting his research, Hayes was surprised to discover that many of the young music fans he was interviewing were fans of vinyl. “This made me wonder why they were interested in something that is for all intents and purposes a dead medium,” he says. These young people were not connected to DJ culture but had switched from buying CDs to collecting LPs, often seeking out obscure recordings.

In multiple interviews, Hayes’ research subjects said they liked the visual appeal of LP jackets and the act of scouring shops and conventions for hard-to-find releases. They overwhelmingly insisted that the sound quality of LPs was superior to that of modern formats and characterized LPs and the artists of the past as more authentic than the barrage of youth-oriented music being aggressively marketed at them today.

In a paper published in the February 2006 issue of Popular Music and Society, Hayes stated that though these reasons for preferring LPs were important, it was the physical interaction required by an LP — the need to gently place a needle on a record, to flip the record and to care for it — that really engaged his subjects. Indeed, he says, their “active involvement in negotiating the pops, skips and crackles endemic to most second-hand records” was essential to the experience and lent the music an air of authenticity.

Worlds away from rural Mapleville, Hayes works in Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood as a Grade 10 and 12 English teacher. “Popular music is so important to young people but it’s often ignored or derided by their parents and by authority figures.”

Hayes argues that an affection for vinyl is liberating for the young people he studied and helps them mark themselves as different from their peers as they reject the music industry’s attempts to define what’s popular and to regulate format. Their preferences are a form of resistance: “Through their retrogressive tastes and practices, these youth effectively disrupt the music industry’s efforts to define and regulate their consumer identities.”

Edited April 26, 2006 by neveronfriday

[Simon Weil]

I just want to say one other thing about nostalgia. It tends to assert that the past was wonderful compared to now. Now thinking about how I related to jazz, coming up in the 70s - I always tended to think of the 50s and before as a golden age. Which in a certain sense, and compared to now, it probably is.

But, then, on the other hand - there is buried in that is a sense that what was happening "now" can never be any good, really, compared to what went before. I think that is how I've felt about Jazz ever since I came up.

But why? I mean - just because the whole Golden Age thing is a myth - there is no particular reason to think that the future, in Jazz or whatever else, can't compete with the past. The trouble is, if you buy into the Golden age myth, you're never going to try - because of the unexamined proposition that it can't be.

That's what's wrong with nostalgia.

Simon Weil

Edited April 27, 2006 by Simon Weil

[JSngry]

Between Reganism and digitality, the word has changed in a fundamental way over the last quarter-century.

Things ain't what they used to be.

No value judgements in that statement either, at least not here. But - if one of the yearnings of "nostalgia" is to restore things to how "they used to be", all I can say is that, although that's never really been possible, it's become even more impossible. Returning to an analog reality just ain't gonna happen unless all digital technology is destroyed and its residual memories and effects erased from the collective memory.

The triumphs of the jazz past should be kept alive and celebrated as the triumphs of the human spirit that they truly were. But they were triumphs over a set of challenges that (generally) no longer exist in the form they existed then. The challenges still exist, definitely, but the specific social circumstances (positive and negative alike) that produced the music of jazz' "golden age" (and as far as I'm concerned, that age goes well into the 1970s, probably even into the early 1980s) no longer exist for the most part.

Yet the challenges remain the same. We still have racism, we still have poverty, we still have rampant, for lack of a better term, "spiritual ?neanderthalism", we still have to struggle to identify ourselves rather than accepting identies created for us (identities which inevitably involve being somebody's involuntary servant in some way). We still got all that stuff going on, and probably more now than ever.

But the degree to which we have these challenges is not the same as the way in which they are manifested. Shit's a whole lot more subtle and subliminal these days. Getting to the source of the problems is a much more difficult proposition these days, because it's become "decentralized". Back in the day, "evil" had faces, unmistakable faces that you could take direct aim at. Not so these days. Shit's become more decentralized than ever, and fighting something you can't really see is quite the daunting proposition.

That, I think, is a key element in nostalgia in general, and jazz nostalgia in particular, the perhaps subconscious realization that "the enemy" can no longer "be gotten to", and a subsequent yearning for a time when punches could be taken and often landed with fatal fury.

A time will come when we get back to being able to get a handle on what it is we yearn to triumph over. But that triumph will come in a different form than it once did. The spirit behind the triumph will be the same, and so will that which is being trriumphed over. These are the eternal truths, no? But in order to triumph over something, you gotta locate it first. And if you keep looking for it where it used to be, you ain't never gonna find it. It ain't there no more.

A good backbeat will always feel good. It'll always get your ass to moving. But if it's a 3D backbeat, it's gonna get your ass moving into a 3D world. And the 3D world is rapidly becoming a theme park, a scaled down replica of a perfect world where you can always get what you want because the forces that keep you from getting it don't live there anymore (if anything, they own the theme park ). But at the end of the day, the park's gotta close, and you gotta leave. And where you gonna go when you leave?

Sleeping in the parking lot until the park opens again seems to be a popular option...

[Shawn]

Classic movie buffs (like myself) are always bemoaning the fact that modern Hollywood films are so one-dimensional and targeted to the lowest common denominator. We wish for a return to the quality of a Casablanca or a Thin Man or The Big Sleep...

It ain't gonna happen.

The world that existed (the Hollywood studio system) allowing those films to be made is long gone and will not return. The quality was at such a consistent level because the studios OWNED all their own actors, directors, writers, etc. The available talent at a motion picture studio like Warner Brothers was fucking staggering.

Of course the downside of this was that the writers, directors, etc (except for a select few) didn't have final say in what films they would do, how they would do them or have approval over final cut. This made them feel like they were being artistically strangled (they probably were) and the fight for freedom from the studios had begun.

However, it's the COMBINATION of the studio's resources and the actor/director's fighting to put their own artistic stamp on the film somehow that caused enough creative tension to make the film a classic. The evidence of this can be found on rack after rack of classic films in any decent video store.

The same rule applies here as to music...if the environment is extinct (it is), don't expect the same lifeforms to emerge from the ooze.

[Simon Weil]

...That, I think, is a key element in nostalgia in general, and jazz nostalgia in particular, the perhaps subconscious realization that "the enemy" can no longer "be gotten to", and a subsequent yearning for a time when punches could be taken and often landed with fatal fury.

A time will come when we get back to being able to get a handle on what it is we yearn to triumph over. But that triumph will come in a different form than it once did. The spirit behind the triumph will be the same, and so will that which is being trriumphed over. These are the eternal truths, no? But in order to triumph over something, you gotta locate it first. And if you keep looking for it where it used to be, you ain't never gonna find it. It ain't there no more.

Well...I think "the enemy is us" - in the sense that all these societies (Western) are getting more hollow, aggressive and nasty and the task for us is to reverse that. Which is easy to say. Inasmuch as it is a real, pervasive, slow descent it is hard to see how one can get a handle on it and which bit one can fight against and land real punches.

But I also think it's kind of simple. I mean, what I long for is some kind of decent society. So if I feel that someone is particularly against that - like Bush is with all his million and one nasty things in the cause of a supposedly democratic world - then I'm against him.

In Jazz, what I have against Marsalis is that he brings such a nasty spirit with him. I think he's like the Jazz version of Bush.

Fighting nastiness is one thing, but fighting hollowness and aggressiveness is different. For that, in my opinion, you need something you really can believe in - a positive ideal. For me, it's the decent society. For other people, it'll be other things. But, I think, that's where the hollowness in society comes from - a lack of core ideals that people really believe in - not say they believe in, but do believe in.

I mean once you get that, society isn't so hollow - per se, because people have things to believe in. And they're also not so aggressive because they have, on some level, an idea that there's some point to life - and they don't feel pissed off and futile and running round in circles like fruit loops.

So I'm nostalgic for when decent people believed.

Simon Weil

Edited April 28, 2006 by Simon Weil

[JSngry]

I concur. Give me something to believe in.

Yet, "positivity" in lyrics (and elsewhere) is too often denouced as naive, "hippy-ish", or some other dismissive. Well, maybe sometimes it is. But sometimes it's nothing more than an attempt to express hope, positivism, a refusal to succumb to darkness. And I'll have me some of that, thank you, because I've lived in darkness and I've lived in light. The choice is obvious, at least for me.

A world where hope is looked at as foolish and cynicism as "realistic" is a world that has surrendered. Period. Our attitude is something over which most of us have a choice, and if I feel good, dammit, I'm going to be happy about it. Maybe even try to spread it around, just because. And if I don't feel good, it's not because this is a dark world. It's a dark world no matter how I feel, dig? Shit is what it is, and a lot of it ain't cool. That's a given. I make as much right as I can, knowing full well that it's ain't never gonna be enough. But I ain't gonna let the bastards get me too down for too long, because what they can do entirely on their own is limited. Anything else requires some personal acquiesence on my part, and that ain't gonna happen, not on an ongoing basis.

"The world" may well be beyond our control, but what we let it do to our minds and spirits isn't. Not if we know we have options. Those who know have an obligation to pass it around, becasue it ain't exactly common knowledge these days.

Edited April 28, 2006 by JSngry

[Ken Dryden]

I came across this quote in the May issue of Jazz Times and thought it was kind of bizarre. From Ron Goldstein, CEO of Verve:

"I realized three or four years ago that if we stuck with jazz, we would be out of business. I just knew it. It's not that we want to be out of the jazz business. It's just that there is nothing that is coming along that is exciting. There was a blip with Joshua Redman, Nicholas Payton, Christian Mcbride 10 years ago, but it seemed to dry up very quickly"

An odd statment, I think. First, nothing against these guys, but is the mid 90s output of Redman et al. the standard by which jazz today should be measured? And it's failing to meet that standard?? What strikes me as odd (even perverse) is that the CEO of Verve, with all of its resources and potential influence, seems so disinterested and out of touch with jazz. "nothing is coming along that is exciting"

So that's why Verve has let go of artists the caliber of Kenny Barron and Geri Allen and signed such "exciting" artists as Jamie Cullum and other lightweights...

Major labels like Verve are overlooking too many jazz veterans that have plenty to offer if they were only promoted seriously.

[.:.impossible]

Exciting jazz musicians do not want to be associated with Verve. I think the door is hitting this guy in the ass.

[JSngry]

My old inner-sleeves need reprinting. Apparently the best jazz is played without Verve!

[.:.impossible]

I guess I should say "anymore"! Verve has an amazing back catalog.

[Joe M]

[chris olivarez]

Artists in every musical genre run the risk of being brushed aside by the major labels. No matter how talented you are if it doesn't make the bottom line happy out you go.