Do the Math: Iverson Interviews Wynton...

[AllenLowe]

interesting theory Larry, about "the objective" but I see some limitations to its application in certain modernist and post-modernist theory - one of the tenets of moderinism as I find it (and it goes back directly to Rimbaud, twists its way through Brechtian alienation, is there is Robbe Grillet's theory of the New Novel, and is abundant in Beckett) is what I call "the impersonal I," a way of writing about the first person in an objective way, as though the first person is the third person - it creates the kind of distancing that I believe is necessary to rescue art from bourgeouise predictability (and its absence is the reason I find so much contemporary fiction outdated and weirdly a-historical - but than, the last generation or two of writers grew up on TV movies and graphic novels) - this gets a little outside of our mission here, and I'll soon be lost if any real literary theorist is around, but I think objectivity can coincide with a personal lyricism, and the power of a lot of modernist and fresh literature (from Buchner/Woyzzek onward) as well as great jazz (I see Ornette as fitting the objective personal, as well as quite a few others) derives from the tension between the artist as seeing it from both the outside and the inside at the same time - the outside, objectivist perspective gives the artist a necessary distance in order to see things as though for the first time. The insider/persona/lyric aspect, to oversimplify, gives it depth and soul -

in terms of this I see Wynton and his crew as being hopelessly old fashioned and stuck in history; great work offers an alternative to that history, stands outside it looking in and not the other way around. As a matter of fact I think this is a larger problem with a lot of very good jazz musicians, who lack any theoretical perspective; when they get stuck in the repetitions of the past, they, without any deep intellectual understanding of the problem, end up with no means of working their way out of these repetitions (hence the old saw about there being no second acts in American life).

Edited December 23, 2008 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

I'd think that anybody who assiduously learned a craft at anything approaching a high level was already good-to-go on the outside, objectivist perspective. I mean, scales, exercises, theory, these things very much require leaving "self" behind in order to master them. Anybody who's tackled an honest regimen of sustained practice knows that when it comes to sheer mechan9ics, things are either right or not. Even the slightest irregularity must be pinpointed and dealt with. The only time "self" comes into play is when & how much to be satisfied (or not) with the results.

That sort of puritanical discipline can drive you crazy, but if you survive, hey, you got your skill set together, at least as far as execution goes. The question for me then is whether or not there was ever any "self" in the first place, and if so, how much of it survives the confrontation with the outside, how much of it is discovered as a result, and how much is nurtured during the process. Or even, how much do you have to forget in order to remember?

Just saying that imo the tension/whatever between objective/personal is seems to be pretty much built into any artistic endeavor that does not involve the style of "free expression" where just being alive qualifies you to claim "artistry" for yourself. I've seen that up close and personal more than once, and god is that a sucker's game, albeit not an unprofitable one... But otherwise, both qualities qork together in a yin-yang type system of complimentary opposites forming a unified whole. The "game", such as it is, is always in the balance and relative shadings of the two.

And I know we're also talking about "bigger" issues such as the place, real/perceived/other of one's place in "things", but for that, I think that both too little and too much awareness is a dangerous thing. Just as you can dumb yourself out of existence, you can also think yourself out of it. Playing of the type that we all hope for requires the much-cliched "now" to be in full force/presence, and all this other stuff is preparation for dealing with it when it gets here. In other words, yeah, be ready, but when the time comes, let go of it and don't look back or down, or anywhere, really.

Edited December 23, 2008 by JSngry

[Larry Kart]

Here's another way to look at it -- and again I'll come back to my current favorite example, Harold Land, with a sidebar for Kenny Dorham. I think I'm drawn to those men as examples in part because they're both very distinctive players who became distinctive players more or less in front of our eyes (Dorham more so than Land, but that's probably because there's more early Dorham on record than there is early Land), and also because neither of them was a dazzling virtuoso -- thus there's little temptation, if you respond to their work, to think of it as being essentially the product of the sort of study and application that rhymes with unusual physical skills, unusual rapidity of mental functioning, etc., though of course both men were quite learned musicians. Further, I like Land and Dorham as examples because their early influences were fairly clear -- Coleman Hawkins. Lucky Thompson, and Charlie Parker for Land, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, and Miles Davis for Dorham.

I'm not enough of a student of Dorham's early career to be exactly certain when he made his first recordings that show a distinctive personality, but I know he made a good many early on that do not. I'm thinking in particular of that 1946 Kenny Clarke 52nd Street Boys date with Navarro alongside him in the front line where Dorham sounds like a Navarro wannabe who isn't really making it -- nor, I'm sure, would Dorham have ever become a truly successful player if he'd continued to try to build something personal in response to Navarro's virtuoso lyricism, or, as is apparent in other early KD recordings, in response to Gillespie's differently virtuosic ... terms, fail me here, but how about virtuoso surrealism for DG?

In other words, Dorham had to realize, had to find in himself, that a certain deep sobriety, a lyricism that was not ecstatic but almost methodical in the way it so carefully parsed things out, was the way he needed to go. And while Miles's playing certainly pointed KD down that path, KD's almost French horn-like timbral colorations, which are so crucial to what he eventually came up with and inseperable from his similarly "shaded" harmonic thinking, are his things alone.

What I'm getting at here, is that as men like Dorham and Land worked at their music, sorting through what was in the air and what they liked (discarding in KD's case in particular some things that they dug but that didn't suit their skills and temperaments), they uncovered/exposed/developed what might be called the "grain" of their selves -- the way someone sculpting a chunk of wood will find himself interacting with/taking account of the grain of that material. Or, to switch images

-- both Land and Dorham are IMO intensely vocal players, and I think it's safe to say that the personal "voices" they developed were, given their acknowledged influences, more an act of discovering and then refining what already was potentially there within themselves, the way one's actual singing voice can be developed and refined through study but remains in and of you. Thinking of Land here, while his influences are again quite clear, even the most obviously pregnant example of Lucky Thompson does not I think lead that readily to the unique "keening" timbre (and all that goes with it) that makes Harold Land Harold Land. In particular, I know of pedagogy that suggests that one play their respective instruments, in timbral terms, the way Land and Dorham came to do.

Especially revealing in that respect is that while Dorham, once he was fully formed, remained more or less in the same lovely place, Land became caught up in the wake of Coltrane, absorbed a heck of a lot of Trane with (some feel) some loss of individuality on his part, but still remained recognizably clearly himself -- this, I feel sure, because the grain of the vocalized self that Land previously had uncovered/exposed/developed was so strong and deep that he couldn't, in an "objective" manner, a la that Virgil Thomson quote, have emulated Trane without his own personal/ lyrical/vocal continuing to be present -- though we're all aware of lots of players who did emulate Trane at that time in an "objective" manner and ended up sounding both fairly false and faceless.

[JSngry]

Larry, it's been my experience, personally, oberservationally, and anecdotally, that the finding & subsequent honing of a voice is in some ways the ultimate act of extended improvisation (one day you know, the next you're not so sure and go looking, and lord only knows how many times that cycle can repeat itself...), and it involves both the "objective" & the "personal". It's the personal that motivates, but it's the objective that delivers. In other words, I might "hear" all kinds of shit, but until I figure out how to actually mechanically replicate what I'm hearing, what have I got other than "notions"? And then, if/when I do get it all together "objectively", that's when the "self" thing comes into play, into the honing/refining/whatever, to make what I've finally gotten a grip on "objectively" more subtle, more nuanced, more...personal.

Now, I know some players who try and do both at the same time, but I don't know anybody who actually "got there" by doing only that. At some point, you gotta confront the mechanics, and that's when "self" pretty much goes out the window. It might seem ironic that the path to "self" involves a negation of it, especially ironic that once you "invent" it in your mind/body/soul that you then have to actually create it mechanically, but, hey....that's just how it goes, or seems to in my experience.

I do think that Land in particular is a very good example of what you're talking about, because here's a guy who never stopped working on his music. I know some find his later work empty and wholly derivative, but as you said, there is always that tone, that voice (and all that comes with that, including articulation, inflection, tonal shadings, etc.) We hear that voice evolve, but damned if we ever really hear it change, become something other than what it had always been once it became what it was (don't really remember right now how personal it was, but the earliest Land I've heard was on one of the Black California albums, and it was definitely not "fully formed", if you know what I mean. Opinions vary on this to be sure, but to my ears, I sometimes I hear the work at the expense of the results, but sometimes I hear - and very much dig - the results, and they are a direct consequence of the work. So really, it's not either/or, it's more "firtst/then. Or ideally that's how it is. sometimes, with some people, it just....stops. Oh well about that...

As this pertains to the broader points at play, I think a big problem, huge problem, hell, maybe even the problem, is that so may players today spend their time on the mechanical without first even having the faintest notion of what they want to do with it other than play. It's as if in a lot of minds, the act of playing has become in and of itself the defining act, the statement itself. Never mind the substance of playing as it pertains to a truly personal voice (and really, you don't have to be an "innovator" to have a personal voice. You'd think that that would be obvious, but at the other end of the "anything goes" spectrum are the "only the very heaviest matter", and a pox on both their houses...), that's beside the point, and if you look at it from one sociologically pov, hey, maybe it is. Maybe just playing "complicated" music on a "real" instrument is a statement in and of itself. Ok, yeah, I guess it is.

But if the statement is that one is defending, rescuing, advocating, whatever, something that is worth doing all that for because it really is that vital to humanity, go ahead and do it all the way, don't just fight for the body, body for the soul as well. And that, I think, is where so much comes up short, because craft is craft, and craft is a bitch in and of itself, and craft is necessary to fully create soul, but craft is not soul. Ok, yeah, you're brave and heroic and all that shit for showing dedication and discipline and discernment, but you're not heroic beyond that level, you're heroic as a mechanical role model, not as a soul role model, unless yours is a soul so hungry for meaning that craft is better than nothing because nothing is the only other alternative you have (and really, I suppose that might very well be a reality for many people. but it is not my reality, which might be the whole problem right there, for all concerned).

I used to use the expression "music about music" a lot a few years ago, and I think it still holds to describe music that is at least one step removed from direct experience (well, ok, two steps really, because of the whole "detachment" phase noted above that is required to get to wherever it is you want to go. but for the sake of "public" consumption, let's call it one, ok?). That is getting us into the Uncle Skid/Kurt Vonnegut area of an artist responding to the art itself, and yeah, sure, there's some good music to be had there (maybe even some great, although my personal bent is to not look for it there, just because...) But at some point, the layer of detachment from the source becomes so great that you gotta...pretend that you're directly connected instead of admitting that your connection is more in spirit than in literalness, and that's when things start getting Wyntony Weird for me, and that's when I get off the bus and decide to walk a mile in my own shoes for a change. Pretty sure they still fit, although maybe sometimes it's time for new laces and a re-heeling...

That's what I think too much music has come to - the objective in the service of the objective - under the guise of an invented/fantasized subjective. However, since yet again, perception ultimately becomes reality, nobody can convince those guys that this is really what they're up to, just as they can never convince us that it's not. And really, as much as it kills me to say this (and up until very recently, I'd not), "identity" is ultimately so much a matter of choice, even, especially, in the face of inescapables, that maybe at the end of the day, that's something we're all just gonna have to live with.

Edited December 23, 2008 by JSngry

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

That's what I think too much music has come to - the objective in the service of the objective - under the guise of an invented/fantasized subjective. However, since yet again, perception ultimately becomes reality, nobody can convince those guys that this is really what they're up to, just as they can never convince us that it's not. And really, as much as it kills me to say this (and up until very recently, I'd not), "identity" is ultimately so much a matter of choice, even, especially, in the face of inescapables, that maybe at the end of the day, that's something we're all just gonna have to live with.

Well, it's certainly true that identity is, or can be, to some extent, a matter of choice. But I'm not sure that one can choose (if one chooses) an identity based on a reality that is invented or fantasised. Or at least, if one tried, one would constantly be faced with the claims of the real which contradicted one's supposed identity. Publicly, someone could possibly get away with that, if they could put on a convincing act, at least for a limited time. But in their own minds, they'd always know, and I think it would be impossible for them to sustain it. See J-K Huysmans, "Against nature".

MG

[JSngry]

Maybe the notion of "freedom of choice" when it comes to identity selection is more an American thing? I mean, we've had some pretty remarkable "makeovers" in our history.

Then again, whatever freedom you do have is dictated by your imagination, and god knows there's enough battles going on, internal and external, to gain control of that...

Edited December 23, 2008 by JSngry

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Yeah, I had in mind that you can't get away from some of the basic building blocks of your character. For example, you can't acquire a different native language - though you can learn to speak a foreign language like a native. But we think in words, so the words with which we grow up are always likely to exercise a formidable influence on the way we think.

And, not to be Freudian, there are things that happen to us while we're young that have a similarly weighty impact. I think I've resisted authority since I was five or six, due to (failed) political indoctrination in the schools I was sent to in those days.

MG

[JSngry]

Yeah, native language...Chuck said something here somewhere a while back about that, that the young cats playing in the older styles, it's not their native language, and no matter how well they come to speak it, it's just not their native language, and those who knoww can tell. Or something like that.

But what about this? What if you can somehow create a culture where you can convince yourself and enough others that it is your native language, if only by birthright, well hey, does that mean that you're fooling yourself, or does it mean that you're killing something off and remaking it in your own image, sort of a Stalinization thing? And if it gets going pretty good, this remaking, at what point does the deception take root and begin a new evolutionary branch on/of its own? Just because something is "wrong" doesn't mean it won't/can't "work", if you know what I mean.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Yeah, native language...Chuck said something here somewhere a while back about that, that the young cats playing in the older styles, it's not their native language, and no matter how well they come to speak it, it's just not their native language, and those who knoww can tell. Or something like that.

Sometimes, they even admit it. Two excerpts from the sleeve notes to Don Braden's "Organic" (Epicure) - first by Joel Dorn, the producer of the CD, second by Braden himself.

Don is an interesting young man, a Harvard man if you wil, and approaches life in a very thorough and analytical manner. After our initial meeting, I didn't hear from him for about two months. In that time, he purchased and studied dozens of the classic organ/tenor records and consulted with record producer, disk jokey, and historian, Bob Porter, who happens to be one of the world's leading experts on the idiom.

I am well aware of the "party" heritage of jazz organ music. In fact, one of the goals Joel and I had for this CD was to capture that "havin' a good time" feeling. At the same time, I wanted the recording to have the intelligence that all of my favourite jazz records have.

But what about this? What if you can somehow create a culture where you can convince yourself and enough others that it is your native language, if only by birthright, well hey, does that mean that you're fooling yourself, or does it mean that you're killing something off and remaking it in your own image, sort of a Stalinization thing? And if it gets going pretty good, this remaking, at what point does the deception take root and begin a new evolutionary branch on/of its own? Just because something is "wrong" doesn't mean it won't/can't "work", if you know what I mean.

I dunno, guv. Sounds like something that's theoretically possible but practically impossible. Or do you know of instances where it's worked?

MG

[david weiss]

Here's another way to look at it -- and again I'll come back to my current favorite example, Harold Land, with a sidebar for Kenny Dorham. I think I'm drawn to those men as examples in part because they're both very distinctive players who became distinctive players more or less in front of our eyes (Dorham more so than Land, but that's probably because there's more early Dorham on record than there is early Land), and also because neither of them was a dazzling virtuoso -- thus there's little temptation, if you respond to their work, to think of it as being essentially the product of the sort of study and application that rhymes with unusual physical skills, unusual rapidity of mental functioning, etc., though of course both men were quite learned musicians. Further, I like Land and Dorham as examples because their early influences were fairly clear -- Coleman Hawkins. Lucky Thompson, and Charlie Parker for Land, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, and Miles Davis for Dorham.

I'm not enough of a student of Dorham's early career to be exactly certain when he made his first recordings that show a distinctive personality, but I know he made a good many early on that do not. I'm thinking in particular of that 1946 Kenny Clarke 52nd Street Boys date with Navarro alongside him in the front line where Dorham sounds like a Navarro wannabe who isn't really making it -- nor, I'm sure, would Dorham have ever become a truly successful player if he'd continued to try to build something personal in response to Navarro's virtuoso lyricism, or, as is apparent in other early KD recordings, in response to Gillespie's differently virtuosic ... terms, fail me here, but how about virtuoso surrealism for DG?

In other words, Dorham had to realize, had to find in himself, that a certain deep sobriety, a lyricism that was not ecstatic but almost methodical in the way it so carefully parsed things out, was the way he needed to go. And while Miles's playing certainly pointed KD down that path, KD's almost French horn-like timbral colorations, which are so crucial to what he eventually came up with and inseperable from his similarly "shaded" harmonic thinking, are his things alone.

What I'm getting at here, is that as men like Dorham and Land worked at their music, sorting through what was in the air and what they liked (discarding in KD's case in particular some things that they dug but that didn't suit their skills and temperaments), they uncovered/exposed/developed what might be called the "grain" of their selves -- the way someone sculpting a chunk of wood will find himself interacting with/taking account of the grain of that material. Or, to switch images

-- both Land and Dorham are IMO intensely vocal players, and I think it's safe to say that the personal "voices" they developed were, given their acknowledged influences, more an act of discovering and then refining what already was potentially there within themselves, the way one's actual singing voice can be developed and refined through study but remains in and of you. Thinking of Land here, while his influences are again quite clear, even the most obviously pregnant example of Lucky Thompson does not I think lead that readily to the unique "keening" timbre (and all that goes with it) that makes Harold Land Harold Land. In particular, I know of pedagogy that suggests that one play their respective instruments, in timbral terms, the way Land and Dorham came to do.

Especially revealing in that respect is that while Dorham, once he was fully formed, remained more or less in the same lovely place, Land became caught up in the wake of Coltrane, absorbed a heck of a lot of Trane with (some feel) some loss of individuality on his part, but still remained recognizably clearly himself -- this, I feel sure, because the grain of the vocalized self that Land previously had uncovered/exposed/developed was so strong and deep that he couldn't, in an "objective" manner, a la that Virgil Thomson quote, have emulated Trane without his own personal/ lyrical/vocal continuing to be present -- though we're all aware of lots of players who did emulate Trane at that time in an "objective" manner and ended up sounding both fairly false and faceless.

I feel I can comment on the Dorham part of this a bit....

As a trumpeter, I think if you are going to play in the be-bop/hard-bop element or at least master it's language than Kenny Dorham harmonically is about the most important trumpeter to study. I certainly transcribed him more than anyone else in college. Early Dorham had elements of Gillespie and Navarro and probably Miles but it gets blurry at times as to who is learning from who as except for Gillespie, they all seem to have common traits that can be attributed to any of them though Navarro is probably the strongest influence. Any trumpet player I ever talked to from that era (mostly Tommy Turrentime) were most in awe of Navarro. To me, and I can be wrong about this but Kenny Dorham seemed to come into his own when he was in Max Roach's band with Sonny Rollins. Suddenly you hear him being much more harmonically complex and using tri-tone subs to greater effect and basically turning into the Dorham that you hear for the next ten years or so. It could be a coincidence or timing, perhaps he just got certain things together during this time or perhaps hanging with Rollins opened him up a bit (remember, Dorham started on tenor sax, which might have something to do with his conception as well). I think Dorham's unique tone had developed way before this, certainly by his first records under his own name and when he was with Art Blakey but the harmonic complexity came later and my theory is the Rollins influence might have had a hand in this.

Or maybe people just develop at different paces. Almost everyone from that period started out sounding like someone else. I guess it's just a matter of how fast you got away from that and developed your own voice.

Edited December 24, 2008 by david weiss

[david weiss]

Yeah, native language...Chuck said something here somewhere a while back about that, that the young cats playing in the older styles, it's not their native language, and no matter how well they come to speak it, it's just not their native language, and those who knoww can tell. Or something like that.

But what about this? What if you can somehow create a culture where you can convince yourself and enough others that it is your native language, if only by birthright, well hey, does that mean that you're fooling yourself, or does it mean that you're killing something off and remaking it in your own image, sort of a Stalinization thing? And if it gets going pretty good, this remaking, at what point does the deception take root and begin a new evolutionary branch on/of its own? Just because something is "wrong" doesn't mean it won't/can't "work", if you know what I mean.

Well, maybe.....

I think if you are going to play in an older style (which is just about every style by now) than you should play with the best musicians from that era. That's what I miss about the apprenticeship system and makes me ask this question. If you played with Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams or Horace Silver for a few years than does this make that music your native language even if you came up in another era. I don't see the point of playing music from another era with my peers or subsequent generations (except at jam sessions I guess but that's more about exercise for me) but I do play in a group with Billy Harper, Eddie Henderson, George Cables, Cecil McBee and Billy Hart on a regular basis. If I live and breath this music with these guys (and also working with Freddie Hubbard and Charles Tolliver) is it my native tongue or am I just getting more fluent in a foreign language even if playing with these guys helps me develop my own voice. If I take these lessons and experience and apply them to my bands with my own original conception and my own compositions does it make my work less original because of my experience with these guys? I'm not sure I can convince myself of anything but the point is I think, is to get there, whatever that there is and there are many paths to this, some that might take you off in the wrong direction but again as long as you get there eventually that should be good enough, no?

Edited December 24, 2008 by david weiss

[JSngry]

David, that's the way it should be done, imo, get the real thing from the real cats, learn the lessons, and then put it to your own uses, build your own language from an informed experience of those who had their own. I have no quibble with that at all. It's the whole ideological thing that gets my goose in the juice. That's where too many lies end up getting told, believed, and built upon.

MG, when I say "work", I'm thinking specifically of the Marsailis movement. It's working, there's a whole school of players there, and they don't seem to stop coming along. They've heard the arguments against, and they are not persuaded to do anything else. so hey, a lot of us think it's all a lie, but they don't , and they have built their own world. So for "us" to argue against it in the face of it's ongoing existence and even thriving might not be anything other than pissing in the wind because we like a warm wet breeze, if you know what I mean.

[AllenLowe]

ultimately if you play the music and it sounds good it IS good, I think everybody would agree - I'm a big fan of Ralph Ellison in this respect who said, more than once, that culture ain't genetic but passed on culturally, etc. My favorite example, of course, is always my late, lamented, crazy friend Dave Schildkraut; white and Jewish and, according to what Dizzy said to me in the late 1970s, "the only alto player to catch the rhythmic essence of bird". (italics mine, of course). Like it or not, racial politics often play into our musical evaluations; my favorite are stories about the old time music collectors of 78s who would sometimes withhold judgement on a recording they heard until they knew whether the performer was black or white; in this way they could judge the "authenticity" of the performance more accurately. Well, there's enough in that action for 2 or 3 books.

I also remember Bill Triglia, white and Italian, pridefully telling me he could play the blues as well as anyone - and he was right (as I've been researching my current blues history I found an amazing little solo he takes on a blues with Lester Young from a 1950s broadcast).

and the blues seems to have been a point of pride for some white musicians -

"I went up to Monk after he played a tune and I said 'Monk let's play some blues.' I wanted to show him I could do it."

-Dave Schildkraut recounting a night at one of the after-hours jam sessions in the '40s (mighta been Mintons, I can't quite remember)

Edited December 24, 2008 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

ultimately if you play the music and it sounds good it IS good, I think everybody would agree -

Well yes, of course, but...there doesn't seem to be one set notion of what actually sounds good. Not that there should be, but I'm just saying that that's a notion that everybody agrees upon until it comes time to put it into practice. I mean, I've had people say that latter-day Lee Konitz "sounds like a baby", and it's not racially motivated nearly as much as it is experiential. To these people, he really does sound like a baby, they don't have an experiential reference to hear it any other way, and all I can do is accept that we don't relate to Lee Konitz in even remotely the same way and leave it at that. Same with the people who tell me that Wild Bill Moore sounds "unrefined".

All I can say is that if it's good to you, then it is good - to you. Beyond that, things can get weird in a big hurry.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

ultimately if you play the music and it sounds good it IS good, I think everybody would agree

So if it sounds good to me, but not to you, does that make it good? Or if it sounds good to you, but not to me, does THAT make it good? Almost everything that gets onto record sounds good to SOMEONE. Does that make Kenny G good?

MG

[AllenLowe]

1)yes

2) no

3 yes

4) yes

5) definitely

6) maybe

7) I'll get back to you

8) ask JSngry -

Edited December 24, 2008 by AllenLowe

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

1)yes

2) no

3 yes

4) yes

5) definitely

6) maybe

7) I'll get back to you

8) ask JSngry -

If you're going to do posts like that, make sure they fall on the same page by deleting one of your own earlier posts, young sir

MG

[AllenLowe]

what? delete one of my masterpieces? I'd sooner sacrifice a child -

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

what? delete one of my masterpieces? I'd sooner sacrifice a child -

Kay.

MG

[AllenLowe]

I didn't say MY child -

[AllenLowe]

by the way - got the Billy Wright LP in the mail -

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Enjoy!

MG

[Larry Kart]

Yeah, native language...Chuck said something here somewhere a while back about that, that the young cats playing in the older styles, it's not their native language, and no matter how well they come to speak it, it's just not their native language, and those who knoww can tell. Or something like that.

But what about this? What if you can somehow create a culture where you can convince yourself and enough others that it is your native language, if only by birthright, well hey, does that mean that you're fooling yourself, or does it mean that you're killing something off and remaking it in your own image, sort of a Stalinization thing? And if it gets going pretty good, this remaking, at what point does the deception take root and begin a new evolutionary branch on/of its own? Just because something is "wrong" doesn't mean it won't/can't "work", if you know what I mean.

Leaving aside the whole Stalinization thing and probably the notion of deception as well, a great deal of what's cropped up over the years (certainly from WWII on) in Europe and various other non-American scenes fits this description in several respects. First, on the Swedish scene, say, there's been the natural, meaningful infusion of various elements -- folkish, temperamental -- that are part of the national/regional character. Lars Gullin would be one of many examples. Second -- and this is particularly tricky and often fascinating -- when you've got undeniably talented musicians who are attuned to what's going on in the U.S.A. but lack total deep familiarity with that music's context, especially the U.S. scene's elusive sense of what's hip, choices will be made that are very interesting and subtly different than the choices that were being made and would ever be made back in the U.S.

A favorite example, because the music's stylistic boundaries are not at all openly unconventional, is the early 1960s work of Sweden's excellent Harry Arnold Orchestra. Some of the writing, by pianist Jan Johannsen and others, might be a personnel offshoot/translation of George Russell's thinking, and who in the U.S. was writing arrangements for big bands in 1962 that showed an interest in George Russell, let alone taking it to personal places? Also, there are two arrangements of Ornette pieces, and both the band and the soloists, especially Arne Domnerus, are way ahead of any of their U.S. counterparts in their understanding of and sympathy toward what Ornette was doing. In part that probably had to do with a certain distance from U.S. scene's then prevailing stylistic/social warfare. Can one imagine, say, Phil Woods playing an Ornette piece with understanding and sympathy in 1962?

And then there's the whole crazy Dutch scene, and Germany, and France, etc. Another favorite example is that Tadd Dameron's music had a much greater impact on musicians in Great Britain in the 1950s, hear Jimmy Deuchar's album "Pub Crawling," than it did in the U.S., and that those musicians, many of them Scots like Deuchar, took it to a place of their own.

[Lazaro Vega]

LK on Dizzy: "virtuosic ... terms, fail me here, but how about virtuoso surrealism for DG? "

Idiosyncratic virtuosity?

[AllenLowe]

virtual virtuosity?