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JLH reissue plans


jonathanhorwich

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It's that "discomfort" that makes the music so interesting to me. It refuses to become either/or and is too damn...substantial to become "nothing" as a result.

In a world where disagreements (polar or otherwise) tend to threaten to render productive functionality impossible and/or irrelevant, this band is a hoot, a real joy, becuase it worked in site of itself.

Music as its own reward, yeah, there's plenty of that to be had (real or imagined!), but after a while that gets too easy and feel-goody, especially when that's the programmed cultural default. It gets to easy to "celebrate" the music and comfortably diminish/dismiss the humans from whence it springs. Music as human - and all that implies - endeavor - and all that implies - hey, that's some real fun right there. Not always pretty, often not, in fact, but put me down as Beauty Is Not Always Pretty.

For me, "hmmmm...." music played by and with real/full engagement is infinitely preferable to "perfect" music played by massaging the Already-There Gland. It's got nothing to do with "style" and everything to do with Honestly Attempting To Resolve. And if No Resolution is to be had, don't fake one. God, please don't fake one. That's ugly.

Put it all out, Jonathan, put it all out.

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I'd also add that the sight of hardcorejazzfans suddenly being worried about somebody losing their money on a sure-to-be top shelf legitimate presentation of obscure music of no small historical interest (and of at least some historical importance, Chicago being the one American city left that continues to move forward with an organic indigenous jazz scene, and every time a light gets shone on all the "local" things that have happened over the years, the more it becomes obvious that always was it so) is most touching, to say nothing of amusing!

If this is the Face of 21st Century Jazz Fandom, I have to say, it's as anti-climactic as 21st Century Jazz itself. Chicago, of course, excepted.

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It's not my money to be worried about, and I wouldn't say I am. J did ask "do you think it will be popular?" I don't think it will be as popular as other possible choices, that's my opinion on that. I'll buy at least one copy when it is released, however it is released.

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Thanks all of you. Kinda sums up my feelings. It's a risk, but tough I'll take the risk. I can think of worse things to lose money on. And money is money. Music trumps it. Yes, Larry on the LP Joe is a bit tentative, uncomfortable or something, but on the real live at Newport performances, the trio jells and oh my god. So much better. The LP was not even close to live at Newport. It was fake. Chicago studio was where it was recorded and used Joe's voice as the announcer. And the last performance of the tapes I transferred turned out to be the real live at Newport and it was very good if my memory serves. I'll take some time in the near future and recheck it all out.

I guess that is that. I'm going to do it no matter what.

Edited by JLH
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On the issue of "discomfort" in music...I can't help but think of the Ellington band and how much ongoing friction there was within the ranks, some of it the stuff of "legend". Now, the conventional wisdom is that everybody forgot about that when they hit the stand, that it all went away and that Music Helped Everything, but no, that is so much romanticized silliness. That band was almost always loose (and occasionally sloppy) as hell, and it came from everybody playing it as they heard it, and if Paul & Rabbitt & Cootie all heard it three different ways and not one of them was going to yield to the other because fuck that asshole, ya' know, it came out those three different ways, and that was the beauty, the functionally successful coexistence of the disagreement, not the elimination of it. And Duke wanted that, Duke wanted that diversity, disagreement and, even, animosity to be there, because he knew that that is the purest real life, and real life can be made to work if it is allowed to be what it really is, that you start stuff falling apart when you attempt to stifle that, and if things resolve organically, so much the better, but don't fake it. Do not fake it. Ever.

Which is not to say that the Joe Daley Trio is Ellington, just the notion that "successful" music is always predicated on "group harmony" is fallacious, to put it mildly. And truthfully, the more I live, the less I enjoy things, especially musical, where everybody just jumps in all happy and starts rowing together and singing happy songs, Life, especially the people part of it, is just not wired to work that way these days, if it ever really was. "Success" comes in a lot of ways besides the obvious. All I've heard of this Daley trio is the RCA record, and as noted, it's fascinating to me precisely because of the tension in the results, not because of the inherent "harmony" of the participants.The possibility of even greater results, no matter what the source of them, is exciting, yes, exciting!

Really, really looking forward to this one.

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On the issue of "discomfort" in music...I can't help but think of the Ellington band and how much ongoing friction there was within the ranks, some of it the stuff of "legend". Now, the conventional wisdom is that everybody forgot about that when they hit the stand, that it all went away and that Music Helped Everything, but no, that is so much romanticized silliness. That band was almost always loose (and occasionally sloppy) as hell, and it came from everybody playing it as they heard it, and if Paul & Rabbitt & Cootie all heard it three different ways and not one of them was going to yield to the other because fuck that asshole, ya' know, it came out those three different ways, and that was the beauty, the functionally successful coexistence of the disagreement, not the elimination of it. And Duke wanted that, Duke wanted that diversity, disagreement and, even, animosity to be there, because he knew that that is the purest real life, and real life can be made to work if it is allowed to be what it really is, that you start stuff falling apart when you attempt to stifle that, and if things resolve organically, so much the better, but don't fake it. Do not fake it. Ever.

Which is not to say that the Joe Daley Trio is Ellington, just the notion that "successful" music is always predicated on "group harmony" is fallacious, to put it mildly. And truthfully, the more I live, the less I enjoy things, especially musical, where everybody just jumps in all happy and starts rowing together and singing happy songs, Life, especially the people part of it, is just not wired to work that way these days, if it ever really was. "Success" comes in a lot of ways besides the obvious. All I've heard of this Daley trio is the RCA record, and as noted, it's fascinating to me precisely because of the tension in the results, not because of the inherent "harmony" of the participants.The possibility of even greater results, no matter what the source of them, is exciting, yes, exciting!

Really, really looking forward to this one.

Well, yes, but the disharmony in the Daley Trio was based on significant musical differences as well as personal ones. In particular, and rightly or wrongly, Thorne and Hal Russell regarded Daley the way Ornette might have regarded pianist Walter Norris on "Something Else!" OTOH, it was Daley's group, and I don't mean at all that the final results weren't fascinating. Also, it should be said that Thorne and Hal Russell were fairly high-pressure personalities, while Daley was no shrinking violet.

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Hal said he and Thorne used to urge Joe Daley to play more "out." While I liked the Daley Trio's free-improv experiments the one time I heard them (Down Beat jazz fest 1965; Clyde Flowers replaced Russell Thorne), I liked Daley's bop tenor playing even moe a fedw years later.

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On the issue of "discomfort" in music...I can't help but think of the Ellington band and how much ongoing friction there was within the ranks, some of it the stuff of "legend". Now, the conventional wisdom is that everybody forgot about that when they hit the stand, that it all went away and that Music Helped Everything, but no, that is so much romanticized silliness. That band was almost always loose (and occasionally sloppy) as hell, and it came from everybody playing it as they heard it, and if Paul & Rabbitt & Cootie all heard it three different ways and not one of them was going to yield to the other because fuck that asshole, ya' know, it came out those three different ways, and that was the beauty, the functionally successful coexistence of the disagreement, not the elimination of it. And Duke wanted that, Duke wanted that diversity, disagreement and, even, animosity to be there, because he knew that that is the purest real life, and real life can be made to work if it is allowed to be what it really is, that you start stuff falling apart when you attempt to stifle that, and if things resolve organically, so much the better, but don't fake it. Do not fake it. Ever.

Which is not to say that the Joe Daley Trio is Ellington, just the notion that "successful" music is always predicated on "group harmony" is fallacious, to put it mildly. And truthfully, the more I live, the less I enjoy things, especially musical, where everybody just jumps in all happy and starts rowing together and singing happy songs, Life, especially the people part of it, is just not wired to work that way these days, if it ever really was. "Success" comes in a lot of ways besides the obvious. All I've heard of this Daley trio is the RCA record, and as noted, it's fascinating to me precisely because of the tension in the results, not because of the inherent "harmony" of the participants.The possibility of even greater results, no matter what the source of them, is exciting, yes, exciting!

Really, really looking forward to this one.

Well, yes, but the disharmony in the Daley Trio was based on significant musical differences as well as personal ones. In particular, and rightly or wrongly, Thorne and Hal Russell regarded Daley the way Ornette might have regarded pianist Walter Norris on "Something Else!" OTOH, it was Daley's group, and I don't mean at all that the final results weren't fascinating. Also, it should be said that Thorne and Hal Russell were fairly high-pressure personalities, while Daley was no shrinking violet.

Exactly, and my gut feeling is that if the group had tried to form as little as, say, 2-3 years later that it would have been dead in the water. But there was that little window when decisions of that sort had not yet really been...finalized, and there they were. Not having been there (or there then), perhaps this is an illusion of hindsight, although Bill Barron is a rough-ish example of a "conceptual" (not executional, not at all) strain of thought that did successfully strike that fine balance between "in" and "out" playing that the Daley trio was rather strongly suggesting (intentionally or otherwise), although not in 1963, no, not in 1963. And of course, Jimmy Giuffre, but that's really another world altogether, Giuffre is, especially by 1963.

What I'd really like to know is this -exactly what was Daley looking for with that trio and that concept? Seems like he was temperamentally incapable of being either a totally "free" player or a totally orthodox bopper or an at-root "blues" player like so many other Chicago tenorists. The guy was obviously a serious dude (I went to school with a former student of his, and the stories of his hardass perfectionism and withering rebuttals of anything cheap/easy were many), but what was his end-game with this trio? Did he even have one?

That's another "human" dimension to the whole thing that has me eager to hear more. Because as you say, there doesn't seem to be anything remotely "easy" about any of it, or any of them, and I kinda like that about people sometimes, especially when it comes to music.

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Jonathan - I'm very happy that you plan to issue the Joe Daley material. I'll definitely buy a copy as soon as it's released and I'll recommend it to others here and elsewhere.

Thanks for what you've done and for what you plan to do.

.......what Paul said.....

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... but what was his end-game with this trio? Did he even have one?

That's another "human" dimension to the whole thing that has me eager to hear more. Because as you say, there doesn't seem to be anything remotely "easy" about any of it, or any of them, and I kinda like that about people sometimes, especially when it comes to music.

End game with this trio? Very good question. Never got to know Daley other than to say hello, though (for a time) Thorne and I were good friends, but my best guess was that Daley was at once genuinely curious about the so-called "new thing" from his bebop with personal extensions position (not that far from, as you say, Bill Barron's, but not as conceptual) and also had some thoughts (goofy as this may seem) that it might pay off commercially -- thoughts perhaps encouraged by his RCA producer Augie Blume. About the payoff part, remember the "climb on board or get left at the station" titles of Ornette's first two Atlantic albums -- "The Shape of Jazz To Come" and "Change of the Century." There was kind of an incipient "youth culture" vibe in the air, which was funny in a way because Daley IIRC was about as far from that in terms of his own personality as could be imagined. As you say, "hardass perfectionism" was his game. BTW, in the incipient "youth culture" vein, John Klemmer was one of Daley's students early on in Klemmer's career, and Klemmer eventually was a successful figure for a while in the "youth culture" arena.

BTW, when Daley and Thorne went their separate ways, Thorne's replacement in the trio was Donald Raphael Garrett, who at the time (at least with this group) was into fairly straightahead, powerfully earthy time-keeping. I recall at a gig Daley expressing her preference for what Garrett was doing over the way Thorne played.

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So...Augie Blume...what was the story there?

http://wtju.net/record/ablume

http://www.legacy.com/Obituaries.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonId=123957597

Probably Chuck could add more, but Blume was with RCA and looking for things that interested him and possibly could pay off. Blume's celebrated 1958 interview with Coltrane is evidence that he was no square:

https://slought.org/resources/interview_john_coltrane

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Wow. Just playing the Joe Daley "At Newport 63" LP now which I just bought again after selling my old copy over 15 years ago. I think because my first copy was quite beat up I did not play it much..if at all. Anyway as I play this album tonight( a M- mono copy) I am surprised by the cheesy track announcements and fake audience noise mixed in. However, beyond those quibbles, the music is just sublime. Count me in as a buyer when you get this reissue CD out. I'd love to hear extra material from this band...

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Wow. Just playing the Joe Daley "At Newport 63" LP now which I just bought again after selling my old copy over 15 years ago. I think because my first copy was quite beat up I did not play it much..if at all. Anyway as I play this album tonight( a M- mono copy) I am surprised by the cheesy track announcements and fake audience noise mixed in. However, beyond those quibbles, the music is just sublime. Count me in as a buyer when you get this reissue CD out. I'd love to hear extra material from this band...

I imagine that there would be a fair number of people here who'd be interested in the CD set once they'd heard some of the music.

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