Herbie Hancock Memoir

[fasstrack]

BTW whoever made the point that Sondheim writes by harmony and is 'amelodic' or some other fancypants cerebralism: go listen to Pretty Women, Anyone can Whistle, Weekend in the Country, Losing my Mind, etc., etc.-all vigorous, original melodies filled out by perfectly matched lyrics and harmony. Then write something in the same ballpark. After failing at that (as would most people BTW) you'll likely think twice about blithely issuing such ill-advised statements.

[Mark Stryker]

Fasstrack -- Actually, I don's see anyone "slamming" Herbie's forthcoming book, unless you count Allen's initial post expressing his dislike for Hancock in his own snarky way. But that post actually launched the rest of this thread, which at least for me, evolved into a stimulating discussion about Hancock's strengths and weaknesses, stylistic trademarks and the larger frame (musical and cultural) in which his music exists. It's been a vigorous back and forth between those of us who really champion Hancock and those who have greater reservations. I think folks on both sides of the aisle have gotten some interesting things to think about.

Larry -- I hear what you're saying: That a harmony-first mentality is effectively leading to the creation of not very effective melodies that exist not as organic entities conceived in unison with rhythm and harmony but as a mere "filling out" of the chords. Right? This can be a chicken and egg discussion but it can be an issue. "Lick" players often think this way. They see the chord and plug in the scale/pattern that fits. But the way all of this breaks down in the brain and comes together on the bandstand is complicated and fluid, with sophisticated players accessing what their ears tell them to play in a web of interconnected decisions, impulses and intuitions.

But to go back: the primacy of melody.

Here's an interesting post from Dave Liebman a few years ago talking about the Lee Konitz/Andy Hamilton book in which he kicks around some of this. I think it's relevant to what you've been arguing.

IT'S ALL ABOUT MELODY

I was interviewed by author Andy Hamilton for his new book on Lee Konitz which I just read cover to cover-a fantastic document_ First of all the format is very interesting. It consists of an over two hundred page interview of Lee covering different stages of his career with comments by other musicians interspersed. Konitz is known in the biz as a very honest, outspoken and verbal person with an ability to cut to the chase when he comments on almost any subject. He is merciless in his opinions (being eighty gives you that right I suppose), highly judgmental (on himself as well), yet very clear and able to back up his comments with plausible explanations. I have always felt that musicians are the best sources for review and comment on others in the field, as long as they keep it objective, include comprehensible musical evaluations with of course nothing personal. Lee does just that. For example he admired Stan Getz except when he "pushed" his sound in the upper register, an observation I absolutely agree with. He is equally critical about himself, mentioning among other things perpetual intonation problems as well as a dislike of playing very fast tempos for example. But the major component of Lee's aesthetic is his absolute allegiance and emphasis on melody making as the essence of improvisation, a view which over the years, I as well increasingly subscribe to.

My generation especially was entranced by harmony. I guess with my book on the subject, I am a prime target for what I am about to say. It was in essence "Giant Steps" which launched many of my peers on that path (or in some cases, a completely reactive "free" of harmonic content style). I was and still am entranced by the richness of color and its subsequent emotional power that I hear and feel from deep harmony as played to such a high level in the mid 60's by specifically Hancock, Tyner and Corea. The same could be said about at a great deal of 20th century classical repertoire with Bartok, Scriabin, Shostakovich, etc., leading the way. My long relationship with pianist Richie Beirach has been predicated to a large part on harmony, which entices the intellect by challenging one to understand and use it. Naturally, it is also a bottomless pit of discovery with unending combinations. Therefore the trap!!

In jazz specifically, rhythm is still king. Without some aspect of swing, the core of the tradition is not present. What constitutes "swing" is a separate discussion, but suffice to say there are numerous ways that in my opinion music can so call "swing." But ultimately, the supremacy of melody has to be acknowledged. As a consequence of its being universal, timeless (beyond style and even culture), with the ability to cut to the core of a listener's visceral reaction to the experience of hearing music as a whole, one must deal with it. As I understand better now, when I hear someone like Chet Baker or Lee play to name two examples, inventing a SPONTANEOUS melody, set in a "swinging" feel as we are expected to do in jazz improvisation, I am duly impressed. In the final analysis harmony shades and supports melody, hopefully enhancing its intrinsic beauty and depth. Of course, as I discuss in my class at Manhattan School of Music on the subject, one's personal judgment as to what constitutes a "good" or a "lyrical" melody are quite subjective. This perception is affected by one's listening experience and in this case, culture, etc., hence an area of discussion always open to analysis and discourse. One way of the other, creating a good melody stands as a crowning achievement, be it written or improvised.

Edited April 15, 2012 by Mark Stryker

[fasstrack]

Well, Mark: I've been sick and unusually grouchy. Grr... Shudda read more. 'I couldda been a contender...it was YOU, Charlie'... I found that Konitz book an irritating kvetchfest and waste of a great mind. Lee IMO had something great, then ruined it 'chasing Lorelei'-meaning pursuing every musical bauble coming his way for lack of faith in himself. He did what Woody Allen did IMO, to the same woeful result. I'm not sure why this self-doubt proliferates so. But I cannot listen to Lee's sound for one thing. Horrible, and again once a thing of unique beauty, clarity, and strength. So for him to be talking shit...

[Larry Kart]

Larry -- I hear what you're saying: That a harmony-first mentality is effectively leading to the creation of not very effective melodies that exist not as organic entities conceived in unison with rhythm and harmony but as a mere "filling out" of the chords. Right? This can be a chicken and egg discussion but it can be an issue. "Lick" players often think this way. They see the chord and plug in the scale/pattern that fits. But the way all of this breaks down in the brain and comes together on the bandstand is complicated and fluid, with sophisticated players accessing what their ears tell them to play in a web of interconnected decisions, impulses and intuitions.

Not exactly, Mark -- or so I think. One needs to look at this historically, in particular at two closely related in time and circumstance periods in jazz -- the time in the mid to late '50s when fairly complicated chord setups were often the thing, as in, say, some of Gigi Gryce's pieces and of course a good deal of West Coast stuff (and actually a lot of Horace Silver, too, much as he dissed the West Coast style) but where some thoughtful actual musicians (like George Russell explicitly, and other figures implicitly, by their practice if not always their words) began to chafe at those setups for two virtually inseparable reasons: That the melodies of such pieces more or less tended to be the top line of the chord patterns, and that the density of the changes turned the improviser into someone running any obstacle course -- that creativity wasn't being furthered here but curtailed.

Then ... well let me quote some of what I wrote in my chapter THE AVANT-GARDE, 1949-1967 from "The Oxford Companion To Jazz":

'Reacting to the music of Ornette Coleman, who had arrived on the national scene less than a year before, composer George Russell explained in the course of a June 1960 dialogue with critic Martin Williams that “if there weren’t new things happening in jazz since Charlie Parker, jazz wouldn’t be ready to accept Ornette.... The way has been paved and the ear prepared by rather startling, though isolated, developments in jazz since the ’forties.”.... Russell’s focus in that dialogue was on specific musical issues, especially on the “war on the chord ” that he felt had been going on in jazz since the bop era and that Coleman had taken up in his own way, liberating himself , in Russell’s view, “from tonal centers’’ in order “to sing his own song ... without having to meet the deadline of any particular chord.” ...

'Ornette Coleman’s “daring simplifications” (the term is Max Harrison’s) seem to come from a different world from that of all the avant -garde jazz that preceded it. Coleman was a native of Fort Worth, Texas, and his early music sounds as though the techniques of Charlie Parker were being read backwards until they trailed away into the jazz, folk, and pop music pasts of the American Southwest—from the loping swing of Charlie Christian and Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys to the blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Coleman made pitch a flexible, speech-like entity (you can, he famously said, play flat in tune and sharp in tune ), while the irregular length and shape of his phrases, and their relation to his no-less plastic sense of harmonic rhythm, took on a freedom that seemed to violate jazz’s norms of craft professionalism.... And yet harmony for him would remain an area of intense potential meaning; in virtually every Coleman performance, powerful cadential events can occur. For that reason, his music should not be thought of as modal in the sense that modality was used to describe the music that Miles Davis and Bill Evans began to make in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Modality for these men, and the host of musicians they influenced , essentially was a means of protecting from disturbance a potentially fragile lyrical growth—witness Davis’ remark that “When you go that way [radically decrease the frequency of chord changes and increase their ambiguity] you can go on forever ... [and] do more with the [melodic] line .” But Coleman’s melodic drive and his appetite for cadence were equally vigorous; there was no need for him to curtail the latter in order to bolster the former. What he and his partners wanted was to be cadential when and where they wanted.' [My emphasis.]

So we have -- historically and in very short order -- a proliferation of harmonic density followed (causally, it seems ) by a radical restriction of it. And I think that the root of both developments was in good part similar, as different as the results might be -- a disruption in the three-ply (or four-ply) relationship between harmony, melody, rhythm, and timbre. The cause of that disruption? Perhaps just the examples of Bird and Bud, in the sense that their meaningful (extremely virtuosic and often emotionally extreme as sell) organic (even at times seemingly driven) juggling of those parameters was in some fundamental ways beyond what other mortal improvisers could or would be likely to achieve, and that in practice some of those parameters might need to be relatively fixed or rationalized (as in, let's say, the Gryce example) or so significantly and "tastefully" weeded out in a streamlined manner (a la Miles and others) that "a potentially fragile lyrical growth" could in practice grow more securely, could "go on forever." Again, though, see the IMO virtual storm of cadential events that Ornette could summon up within his so-called "free" playing, let alone the music of Cecil, late Trane, Ayler, Roscoe Mitchell, et al., which introduced various and quite different ways to speak than the aforementioned chord-dense and "modal" approaches that followed so closely upon each other.

P.S. What makes a melody organic in my view (apart from what may be purely subjective considerations) is not its lack of dependence on a more or less pre-existing harmonic framework that is, when the results are not organic, essentially "filled out." Rather, it's that the relationship among melody, harmony, and rhythm almost always tends to be contrapuntal in the broad sense -- i.e. any of those parameters can take the wheel of the vehicle at any moment, while talking meaningfully and freely to the others. Much as I love Gershwin, Porter, Arlen, et al., in the history of American popular song, I'd give top marks here to Richard Rodgers. That may be why I was so tickled by the fairly recent Ornette concert performance of "Turnaround" (don't recall which album it's from) where he begins his solo with the melody of "If I Loved You," and it sounds like the most natural thing imaginable. (And I think that's not the only Ornette performance of "Turnaround" where he does that.)

[Larry Kart]

P.S. Can't point to a whole bunch of them off the top of my head --except for some of his lovely solo on "When Lights Are Low" from "Cookin,'" especially the way he gets out of it -- but there are a good many Miles solos from that period that IIRC are very Richard Rodgers-like melodically.

[JSngry]

Too much math for R&B, some of this is...

Just enough math for R&B:

Of course, the rhythmic portion of the equation (as well as the allowance of the main melody to be a section of the composition rather than its entirety) is set-up to factor in not sitting still in a theater or riding an elevator while the melody is being expositated, although I have no ideal in god's great finishing school what part of the equation the hand gestures were input to trigger. Maybe it's a tribute to tuxedos of yore, who knows?

All of which to simply say that at some point, although apples and oranges can both be used in fruit salad, who wants an orange pie, and there's no such thing as apple zest.

Now, does it still rain in Indianapolis in the summertime, or has climate change pretty much wiped that out?

[AllenLowe]

not to be snarky, but Larry as usual nails it in the kind of way that usually sends me running from the whole art of the improviser - not because he's wrong but because he's so exactly right about why jazz has shrunken in weird ways from a universal music to one that too often seems codified in increasingly dull ways. So to try and play something that's fresh and interesting and intellectually deep seems more and more difficult. I have hear Herbie play things with Miles that quite specifically address this problem in the best possible way (and in ways, to re-beat that dead horse of Tristano, But don's ask me about this ask Ben Neuman).

the whole harmony melody thing is beyond complicated, and few people other than Mingus have, post 1960, attempted to establish what I would call new triadic relationships (well, Monk, too, but in a very different way; also check out Hemphill's one big band recording). I've always thought intervallically - in other words, that any note implies at a minimum 5 harmonic relationships. Good luck explaining this to any bass player where I live, but that's another story. I think Ornette thinks this way exactly (and this is something Jimmy Garrison confirmed) - but ultimately, if this makes any sense, Bud and Bird and Richard Rogers have been here and gone, and done what they could do to the absolute intellectual and emotional limit. As Paul Bley has said, nobody else could do what they did in the way they did it, so why try?

and btw, I am not snarky. Accurately satiric, perhaps; because one man's snarkiness is another's parody.

Edited April 15, 2012 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

I think Dave Liebman's wrong about melody being supreme, at least as far as that being some kind of Provable Universal Absolute.

Rhythm, on the other hand...not as "style" (aka "swing") but as if you're going to have one sound follow another, you gotta figure out when they will, and then all the harmony and melody stand in line waiting for that decision to made.

[Mark Stryker]

On deadline on a review (Bizet's "The Pearl Fishers" of all things), so no time to digest and respond to Larry at this point. Re: Allen: I withdraw the original charge of snarky in favor of "satiric post delivered with perhaps a soupcon of crotchetiness."

"Better?" he asked, snarkily

Edited April 15, 2012 by Mark Stryker

[Larry Kart]

I think Dave Liebman's wrong about melody being supreme, at least as far as that being some kind of Provable Universal Absolute.

Rhythm, on the other hand...not as "style" (aka "swing") but as if you're going to have one sound follow another, you gotta figure out when they will, and then all the harmony and melody stand in line waiting for that decision to made.

I think that in music in general (with obvious historical-stylistic exceptions) and in jazz with particular and arguably unique detail and force, one of the main things is that any one of the four (or more?) parameters -- melody, rhythm, harmony, and timbre --can be transformed into the other(s) tout de suite. That is, what is and/or seems to be primarily or exclusively a harmonic event can be revealad to be a rhythmic one etc., etc. -- and round and round we go. Is Bechet's timbre or Lester Young's a matter of timbre per se, or is it interactive with and more or less inseparable from their rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic acts? In jazz at its strongest nothing is clothing, everything is language and structure.

[robertoart]

I think Dave Liebman's wrong about melody being supreme, at least as far as that being some kind of Provable Universal Absolute.

Rhythm, on the other hand...not as "style" (aka "swing") but as if you're going to have one sound follow another, you gotta figure out when they will, and then all the harmony and melody stand in line waiting for that decision to made.

I think that in music in general (with obvious historical-stylistic exceptions) and in jazz with particular and arguably unique detail and force, one of the main things is that any one of the four (or more?) parameters -- melody, rhythm, harmony, and timbre --can be transformed into the other(s) tout de suite. That is, what is and/or seems to be primarily or exclusively a harmonic event can be revealad to be a rhythmic one etc., etc. -- and round and round we go. Is Bechet's timbre or Lester Young's a matter of timbre per se, or is it interactive with and more or less inseparable from their rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic acts? In jazz at its strongest nothing is clothing, everything is language and structure.

What's the Blues in Jazz? Language, structure or clothing?

Edited April 15, 2012 by freelancer

[Larry Kart]

I think Dave Liebman's wrong about melody being supreme, at least as far as that being some kind of Provable Universal Absolute.

Rhythm, on the other hand...not as "style" (aka "swing") but as if you're going to have one sound follow another, you gotta figure out when they will, and then all the harmony and melody stand in line waiting for that decision to made.

I think that in music in general (with obvious historical-stylistic exceptions) and in jazz with particular and arguably unique detail and force, one of the main things is that any one of the four (or more?) parameters -- melody, rhythm, harmony, and timbre --can be transformed into the other(s) tout de suite. That is, what is and/or seems to be primarily or exclusively a harmonic event can be revealad to be a rhythmic one etc., etc. -- and round and round we go. Is Bechet's timbre or Lester Young's a matter of timbre per se, or is it interactive with and more or less inseparable from their rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic acts? In jazz at its strongest nothing is clothing, everything is language and structure.

What's the Blues in Jazz? Language, structure or clothing?

Language and structure when it's present -- but it needn't be always. Clothing, too, when the blues is being dished up by some b.s. artist.

[JSngry]

Timbre is rhythm too, because in order to get "your sound", you have to control the speed and direction of whatever it is that directs the vibration of the sound (i.e. - the mechanics of your instrument's sound production). In other words, every timbre has its own vibrational rhythm.

Hell, vibrations themselves are rhythm before they're anything else. So yeah, sound itself is rhythm.

Play me one chord and sustain it for 30 minutes. I guarantee you that at some point a "dancing" rhythm of the overtones will start to appear.

[Shawn]

I especially like this from the article:

"The book will be, in part, a financial journey. Hancock will tell of being a greedy pianist who, after disavowing his Lennie Tristano influence, decided to make as much money as possible by playing bad music.

"Hey," Herbie added, "when I die I'll have more money in the bank than Bud Powell, Lennie Tristano, Hank Jones, Fats Waller, Art Tatum and Jelly Roll Morton combined. So who's the chump now?"

Envy, pure and simple.

If anything is even remotely commercial, it will be attacked, lampooned and dismissed. This kind of reaction is no different than Punk Rock fans dismissing an artist as soon as they sign a major label deal. It's close-minded, elitist posturing.

[AllenLowe]

not true - Armstrong is commercial, The Beatles are commercial. James Brown is commercial, Hell, even Beethoven is commercial these days. The Lovin Spoonful was commercial. The Velvets were commercial. Patty Smith is commercial (well, she sucks). Miles was commercial. Mamie Smith was commercial. Bessie Smith was commercial. Basie was commercial. Ibuprofen is commercial. Cheeseburgers are commercial.

but I like (almost) all of the above.

Edited April 15, 2012 by AllenLowe

[bneuman]

I'm interested in Larry's series of quotes about Ornette and the "modal" reaction and all that. I feel like most tellings of that stage of jazz history are confused because of what we call "modal" today. "Modal jazz" usually refers to what Coltrane was doing in the later days with Tyner. This pretty much means superimposing a lot of complicated diminished-based patterns against one chord for a really long time. It's "modal" because Coltrane got the idea to sit on one chord like that from Miles. But the Miles/Evans (both of them) modal project was just about the opposite of what Coltrane was up to. For Miles, "modal jazz" was (initially, at least) actually about pulling simple melodies out of the unique sounds of modes -- Dorian, Phyrgian, etc. -- rather than about all the stuff you could superimpose over "one chord".

I think you can really hear this if you contrast how Evans solos on 'So What' to how Tyner plays on a minor modal tune. Evans just plays impressionist-influenced clusters which draw out the unique flavor of the mode and, in their way, trace a simple, fragile melody. Tyner, meanwhile, plays a bunch of pentatonics or treats the chord as a standard minor tonic and imposes some dominant stuff over it. Now and then he might emphasize the natural 6, that Dorian sound, but it's almost just an incidental part of the "pentatonic" sound.

I think the Coltrane/Tyner "modal" thing and its influence on so much of later jazz is responsible for a lot of that "death of jazz" stuff Larry and Allen are talking about, especially when later players like Brecker and Liebman took the patternistic way they played over one chord and devised ways to impose similar patternism onto the chord changes of standard tunes.

I also think this is all different from what Herbie was up to. To some degree, he certainly is influenced by "modality" in the sense that Evans (and Russell, I think) were interested in it. This is his "impressionistic" side I think Mark talked about, which you can hear from him sometimes on "modal" tunes as well as standards. He is also interested in freely sliding between keys -- playing more or less straightforward diatonic ideas, but playing them in a key other than what the changes dictate. I think what Hancock/Carter/Williams at least hoped to do was take that freedom Ornette gave them, to follow the ear for melodic diatonic ideas to whatever key it took them, and apply it to standards. They have less freedom with their resolutions than Ornette, but they still create plenty of it.

I think that playing in this way -- freely sliding between keys -- can be quite interesting when you play totally free (Ornette) or try to apply it to standards (Plugged Nickel, Paul Bley's brilliant solo on 'All The Things You Are', maybe even Tristano in a way). When you apply it to "modal" tunes, however, which sit on one chord for a while and then go to another, it can be pretty boring. There can be a lot of sliding through keys just to generate interest against a boring harmonic background, in the similar way that a Tyner-patternist might play a whole bunch of stuff to generate interest against a boring harmonic background. The harmony is free enough that you don't really have to keep conscious of the underlying melody, as you would on a standard, but it's also structured enough that you don't have to be ready for absolutely anything to happen, as you would in a free context. I remember liking Herbie's solo on 'Riot' from 'Speak Like a Child', but for the most part I've never found his playing on more open "modal" tunes as interesting as his playing on, over, and against changes. Even on the 'Riot' solo I can think of some passages that can be reasonably perceived as 'just shifting a simple idea through keys for lack of anything better to do' rather than 'spontaneous melodism'.

I actually think Larry made a good point in his original review about saxophone players. A horn player can generate a lot of interest against a simple backing just by holding one note. You can't really hold a note like that on piano, and so pianists are very quick to resort to sliding between keys or pentatonics or augmented diminished lydian chromatic scales in "modal" contexts. I think Evans's way of playing modal might have been the best way to do it -- impressionistic clusters, lots of pregnant pauses, one chorus, get out of there. But that's not where most modal pianism has gone.

[AllenLowe]

interesting; when I play in an open way, I usually give the rhythm section a central key but then ask them to follow me - because I always thought Ornette, Dolphy (of course) and even Trane always gave the sense that there was a harmonic sensibility beneath the lines they played. Like Tristano, who had the daring to end phrases on non-diatonic intervals. I love chord changes because they are so challenging, though if you don't do it all the time (and because I have played maybe 7 standards gigs in 16 years) it's hard to do well and without falling back on patterns - though patterns are more a hazard, I think, for scientific players like Liebman. For better or for worse, I'm a 12 tone man.

and on occasion, I guess, snarky, depending on which definition you use.

Edited April 15, 2012 by AllenLowe

[Larry Kart]

Timbre is rhythm too...

That was among my points, I think, though I'd rather say, again, that timbre can become rhythm, just as any other parameter (sorry for that word) can become any other (as in take on some of the essential in-action language qualities of the other in the course of the making). Fpr me, "is" a tad too determinative; it tends to imply that rhythm (or something else, but in this case rhythm) is the obvious, righteous boss. Tain't always so, McGhee -- not IMO.

[Larry Kart]

@ Ben -- by "modal jazz" ( in quotes), I meant "the Miles/Evans modal project" and what flowed from it, not the Coltrane-Tyner thing. First, the Miles/Evans thing and all that flowed from it came first; second, it was (so I think) significantly about "protecting from disturbance a potentially fragile lyrical growth" -- which was not at all the case with Coltrane-Tyner; their music was about (if you will) the fact or the illusion of intense expressionistic heat (as you yourself pointed out a few post ago, Ben, in speaking of Tyner's differences from Hancock).

[robertoart]

Well in terms of the social/cultural implications of modality, the Coltrane/Tyner parallel fourths pentatonic approach is the precursor of the Afro-centric movement as much as the Coleman melody-centric approach. That players like Liebman, Brecker et.all. were formally captured by this sound, is well documented in the very interesting Liebman interviews posted recently. In contrast to this, I have always understood the Davis/Evans approach to be aligned closer to European sensibilities. And that is always the way the arguments seem to resolve beyond the purely formal. The excellent nuances of the arguments here notwithstanding.

[Dave James]

With respect to selling out, how would you view the following jazz luminaries:

Stanley Turrentine

Gerald Wilson

Count Basie

Chuck Mangione

Art Blakey

Maynard Ferguson

Alfred Lion

I guess I'm arguing that anyone who has at some point decoupled from their muse almost always does so based on economics. I don't think Herbie is any different. He's certainly smart enough to realize that interest in the kind of music to which he had devoted his life was drying up. Time to switch gears in order to remain hip, relevant and, most importantly, marketable.

[JSngry]

Timbre is rhythm too...

That was among my points, I think, though I'd rather say, again, that timbre can become rhythm, just as any other parameter (sorry for that word) can become any other (as in take on some of the essential in-action language qualities of the other in the course of the making). Fpr me, "is" a tad too determinative; it tends to imply that rhythm (or something else, but in this case rhythm) is the obvious, righteous boss. Tain't always so, McGhee -- not IMO.

Show me anything that happens at any level without vibration, and you'll be showing me something that doesn't exist. Everything is vibration.

Now, if it suits your personal frame of reference to say that vibration is boss instead of rhythm, that's a deal I'll make on nothing more than a smile and a handshake, no problem. I'm good for that one.

But- once you get past semantics and general usage oversimplifications of "rhythm = beat" and the like, I don't see how you get around vibration & rhythm being the same thing.

[robertoart]

Too much math for R&B, some of this is...

Just enough math for R&B:

Of course, the rhythmic portion of the equation (as well as the allowance of the main melody to be a section of the composition rather than its entirety) is set-up to factor in not sitting still in a theater or riding an elevator while the melody is being expositated, although I have no ideal in god's great finishing school what part of the equation the hand gestures were input to trigger. Maybe it's a tribute to tuxedos of yore, who knows?

All of which to simply say that at some point, although apples and oranges can both be used in fruit salad, who wants an orange pie, and there's no such thing as apple zest.

Now, does it still rain in Indianapolis in the summertime, or has climate change pretty much wiped that out?

Reaching out in acknowledgement to a commercial audience

I would have bought the 45. If only I'd known.

[AllenLowe]

I don't think of it in those terms - of "selling out." I just get annoyed when they start making really crappy music; motivations vary, though usually it is some kind of market strategy. Let them make as much money as they want; just don't pretend it's some kind of populist strategy, a return to the people. I gave up on that after the Stalin-Hitler pact.

[Dave James]

Too much math for R&B, some of this is...

Just enough math for R&B:

Of course, the rhythmic portion of the equation (as well as the allowance of the main melody to be a section of the composition rather than its entirety) is set-up to factor in not sitting still in a theater or riding an elevator while the melody is being expositated, although I have no ideal in god's great finishing school what part of the equation the hand gestures were input to trigger. Maybe it's a tribute to tuxedos of yore, who knows?

All of which to simply say that at some point, although apples and oranges can both be used in fruit salad, who wants an orange pie, and there's no such thing as apple zest.

Now, does it still rain in Indianapolis in the summertime, or has climate change pretty much wiped that out?

Reaching out in acknowledgement to a commercial audience

I would have bought the 45. If only I'd known.

Herbie Michiru?

Monday Hancock?