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Wynton Marsalis


Simon Weil

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-- side by side w/the just released Nas Hip Hop Is Dead (the album, which is fucking masterful, like seriously*...). i love the South but... Queens kills it... (& naw, it ain't really dead).

Someone else said this was a good one. Might have to check it out....haven't bought a Nas album in 10 years.

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Even so, what's the fucking rhetoric? Is he going to take SPECIFIC rappers to task over SPECIFIC affronts to his oh-so-sophisticated understanding of Negritude? now i ain't gonna front mine but this reactionary horseshit sure seems like more inane Crouch-ism (minus the criticisism of faux radicals-- can we assume Winston's been deep in a Last Poet's phase? riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight) to me.

not at all calling out bruthas Laz & Tex but I defy everyone with an interest in this to play it-- whatever "it" is-- side by side w/the just released Nas Hip Hop Is Dead (the album, which is fucking masterful, like seriously*...). i love the South but... Queens kills it... (& naw, it ain't really dead).

peace!

c

* listen to "Black Republican," the duo w/Jay-Z for a hint towards what Marsalis shoulda bucked up to decades ago.

Dude, there was a little bit of tongue in cheek going on.

I mean, I love how wynton "justifies" his quasi-rapping by saying that it was a part of his growing up in New Orleans... :rolleyes:

Looks like the storyline of the second half of this cat's life is going to be that of a man trying to get back in touch with shit he tried to kill for the first half of it. Only now, it's "legitimate" because he says so, and because he's going to use it to move ahead. Well, ok, how do you move "the music" ahead when it's already light years ahead of you? It reminds me of a man being dragged by a galloping horse thinking that the reason the horse is moving so fast is because it's being pushed by the man being dragged, not because the poor horse is trying to shed that dead weight in as expedient a way as possible.

Pitiful.

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Even so, what's the fucking rhetoric? Is he going to take SPECIFIC rappers to task over SPECIFIC affronts to his oh-so-sophisticated understanding of Negritude? now i ain't gonna front mine but this reactionary horseshit sure seems like more inane Crouch-ism (minus the criticisism of faux radicals-- can we assume Winston's been deep in a Last Poet's phase? riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight) to me.

not at all calling out bruthas Laz & Tex but I defy everyone with an interest in this to play it-- whatever "it" is-- side by side w/the just released Nas Hip Hop Is Dead (the album, which is fucking masterful, like seriously*...). i love the South but... Queens kills it... (& naw, it ain't really dead).

peace!

c

* listen to "Black Republican," the duo w/Jay-Z for a hint towards what Marsalis shoulda bucked up to decades ago.

You got that one too, huh? Jeez, and I'm so LAME. You don't want to admit that you listen to the same shit as a fossil like ME.

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i think i understood that, Tex-- you were being wry... you ever get into a solo or improv & yr out there... yr out there... yr out there... & then yr like... uh? what the fuck am i doing HERE?

Hell, that happens to me damn near every time I leave the house to go to work...

Got a copy of the new Nas from my son, btw, and spun it all last night. Good, interesting stuff, and lyrically, a lot of it it sounds like the 21st Century Jazz thread applied to hip-hop.

BTW - the JB sample you referenced in another thread is from "Get Up, Get Into It And Get Involved".

A tad less obvious, and more sublime for me, was the "After The Dance" sample on one tune (just had a burn, so I can't say which one. Nice!

But yeah, if hip-hop is dead, where does that leave Wynton's version of jazz? Post-dead? Never alive in the first place? Alive, but in a world other than this one? All of the above?

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Time has shown shown that the extreme opinions about him are off base. He's neither the Savior of jazz nor the devil incarnate.

The former should be obvious by now, but the latter depends on how you feel about how he, through words & deeds alike, reshaped the professional landscape of the music, both directly & through "ripple effect". We've had roughly a quarter-century of unnecessary & irrelevant debates about what is/isn't "acceptable" to be considered jazz, who is or isn't playing "real" jazz, and just all kinds of bullshit in general that has resulted in a professional environment that is a helluva lot more fractured, factionalized, and tunnel-visioned than it was that quarter-centruy ago.

We've also seen the evolution of the "image" of jazz evolve from that of a music distinguished by a slightly "dangerous" viscerality into that of a grand cultural status symbol that is to be revered for merely existing instead of earning its keep by delivering a living & breathing immediate relevancy that also has the depth to stick around over time. Any music suffers when its sudience expects to be readily & immeditely comforted by the mere presence of a historical legacy rather than confronted & challenged (at some level, not necessarily "stylistically, but emotionally) contemporary challenge.

Will the music recover? Well, the mummies & necrophilliacs already have their museum, so they're set for "life". But the rest of us might as well get on with the business of making & developing music that for any number of reasons will never be accepted as "jazz" in that museum. All we run the risk of is not being relevant to the people who go to the museum to fornicate with the undead. That, and not getting their money and business networks.

Oh well. Sounds like a fair deal to me.

I think this is a pretty fair assessment of what has happened to jazz: Jazz entering the arts center, just as the arts center dies; kind of like blacks inheriting the urban political machine just as it dies. In both cases clever people realized that this was something you never wanted to win.

BUT, it seems to me that Marsalis was the spokesperson for this development, not the primum mobile, and that he's more a symbol of it than a proper object of blame.

The discussion gets more interesting if you widen the historical focus a bit. Long before Marsalis, some in jazz were making claims not to be show biz, not to be jazz, not to owe the audience a damn thing, to be a self-justifying ARTFORM in letters three feet high and if you didn't like it you were nothing but a philsitine/xenophobe/cryptoracist/self-hater/undersexed yadda yadda yadda.

THIS kind of rhetoric was the first step toward the Museum door. Marsalis and the institutionalized jazzartist were more or less the logical next stage when people stopped buying the romantic-artist/freak/social outcast line. No more than a plain realization (and along with it professionalization) of the fact that jazz, to a large extent, had already entered the academy.

You don't get university gigs when people think you are visceral. You get those when they think you are a curator or a museum piece yourself. And you gotta do something to make them think that.

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  • 2 months later...

who is on piano?

Someone named Dan Nimmer. I know this because I heard a cut from Nimmer's new album on XM radio's "Real Jazz" channel today and since the name was unfamiliar to me, I looked him up on AMG and saw that his only other listed credit was on Wynton's new CD. It's really no surprise, since when an unfamiliar name pops up on "Real Jazz" it usually turns out to be someone associated with Wynton and/or the LCJO.

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Ok, I listened to samples of all the clips. Good enough, but, uh....Max & Abbey done been there, done that, timelier, angrier, and better.

At this point in the real world, this is truly harmless music. Certainly not what he had in mind, I'm sure, but damn...

I feel sorry for the guy at this point. I really do.

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You're called Elis and you ask who's on piano? :D (Hope you get that!)

Elis as in Regina, not Ellis, silly goose man.

elis24.jpg

I only asked though because I love pianist Eric Lewis, who played with Wynton for a spell. Clearly that's not him playing on the new album, though.

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