Wynton is live right now...

[Larry Kart]

Jim -- I believe that the history of art is essentially the history of artistic expression. Kings, popes, commissars, businessmen, democratically elected governments, etc. all can have their say and, they can encourage, suppress, dictate, etc. up to a point, but they cannot generate art without the need/desire to express in particular various ways on the part of those who actually make it. Check out, for example, the Council of Trent, when the 16th Century Roman Cartholic Church tried to suppress all liturgical polyphonic music because it obscured the clarity of the liturgical text. Suppress they could, up to a point, but they could not then generate the creation of any artistically meaningful body of non-polyphonic liturgical music.

http://www.hoasm.org/IVF/Palestrina.html

There's some myth-making involved in this story (see above), but its core remains sound IMO.

[Teasing the Korean]

Notation was/is a means to an enc. There are other means to that end as well.

Once upon a time, notation was needed to impose the consistency. Today, not so much. There are other tools to be used, and they are being used.

Of course, but those other tools were not available prior to the 20th century (for the most part), so notation is the best we have, until time travel is perfected.

[slide_advantage_redoux]

I am surprised that I am even commenting on anything Wynton related. I have no use for his music at all.

I do respect his technical prowess on the horn. He is a phenomenal instrumentalist.

But his improv? He has never reached me emotionally. (I make the same observation re: Bill Watrous (whom I idolized and tried to emulate as a player when I was in my younger years)

No emotional substance. That is my opinion, but there it is.

I also have harbored a long running grudge against him ever since his Jazz Times interview/feature circa 1981 0r '82. In it I remember him stating that - and I paraphrase - "this is the black man's music and I won't play with white musicians"

If that isn't the exactly how he stated it, it is pretty close to the sentiment I gathered.

And from that point I had him pegged. I told myself: "okay then, this white musician will never spend a dime on your music"

So far so good. I do however have many of Branford's releases. And he reaches me emotionally.

There, I went ahead and acknowledged the white elephant in the middle of the room; reverse racism in jazz.

Then I suspect you would probably have to get rid of a lot of music from your collection (and collective listening experience). Because I'm sure the spirit of what Marsalis said - is/was -echoed publicly and privately by many Black American musicians.

The music is Wynton Marsalis's cultural heritage, how he chooses to respond and proceed with it is his business.

Nothing to do with the 'reverse racism' thing as you see it. Nothing whatsoever.

And obviously he has mediated that stance over the years. But it is obviously a cultural and political position Black American musicians keep returning too in one form or another.

I wonder why?

I am sure you are correct. I would have been really surprised to see the Art Ensemble with a white guy for instance.

The thing is, Wynton verbalized it. And yet, he turned right around and made a fortune (and a Grammy) playing classical music.....which really I have no problem with.

But it is the hypocrisy of the situation that chaps my ass.

[JSngry]

Jim -- I believe that the history of art is essentially the history of artistic expression. Kings, popes, commissars, businessmen, democratically elected governments, etc. all can have their say and, they can encourage, suppress, dictate, etc. up to a point, but they cannot generate art without the need/desire to express in particular various ways on the part of those who actually make it. Check out, for example, the Council of Trent, when the 16th Century Roman Cartholic Church tried to suppress all liturgical polyphonic music because it obscured the clarity of the liturgical text. Suppress they could, up to a point, but they could not then generate the creation of any artistically meaningful body of non-polyphonic liturgical music.

http://www.hoasm.org...Palestrina.html

There's some myth-making involved in this story (see above), but its core remains sound IMO.

I'm not nearly concerned as much with what happens while it's being made or who's making it as I am with what happens to it after the people who did make it, sticky circumstances and all, end up going away and the "full ownership" of it shifts to...somebody else (because it almost always does). Because then the creators aren't around to fight back even subversively. That's when you end up with Culture.

Make mine fluid, please. By any means necessary.

Edited October 10, 2012 by JSngry

[DMP]

His Christmas album grew on me...

[AllenLowe]

I know what you mean - like a fungus.......

[king ubu]

Wynton is ... what the f*ck do I care where he is anyway?

[Larry Kart]

Jim -- I believe that the history of art is essentially the history of artistic expression. Kings, popes, commissars, businessmen, democratically elected governments, etc. all can have their say and, they can encourage, suppress, dictate, etc. up to a point, but they cannot generate art without the need/desire to express in particular various ways on the part of those who actually make it. Check out, for example, the Council of Trent, when the 16th Century Roman Cartholic Church tried to suppress all liturgical polyphonic music because it obscured the clarity of the liturgical text. Suppress they could, up to a point, but they could not then generate the creation of any artistically meaningful body of non-polyphonic liturgical music.

http://www.hoasm.org...Palestrina.html

There's some myth-making involved in this story (see above), but its core remains sound IMO.

I'm not nearly concerned as much with what happens while it's being made or who's making it as I am with what happens to it after the people who did make it, sticky circumstances and all, end up going away and the "full ownership" of it shifts to...somebody else (because it almost always does). Because then the creators aren't around to fight back even subversively. That's when you end up with Culture.

Make mine fluid, please. By any means necessary.

Make mine fluid, too. But as for 'what happens to [art] after the people who did make it, sticky circumstances and all, end up going away and the "full ownership" of it shifts to...somebody else (because it almost always does),' as I see it, "ownership" more often than not, and in the ways that matter most, significantly belongs to/devolves onto the music itself, to its course and meaningful evolution over time. To take one example among many possible, you're aware of the brilliant take that Air did back in the mid-1970s on the music of Joplin and other ragtime and early jazz figures -- this initially IIRC because they were asked to provide music for a Chicago theater company's stage play that had events of that era as its subject. As it happened, of course, Threadgill, Hopkins, and McCall had in their musical-emotional-expressive sensibilities just what it took to run with this material and make something that was at once beautiful and new and full of deep fluid insights into what the original music was about. So it can happen -- if you've got someone like Threadgill involved and he's really interested. Was that an act of Culture or not, by your standards? In any case, I think I'll trust, until proven otherwise, that enough Threadgills will arrive periodically to keep the ball rolling. Also -- and again in any case -- I see no significant remedy for the ownership problem/issue that is not finally a matter of artistic expression being allowed to take place with the requisite degree of freedom, and I can imagine a lot of more or less political remedies for the ownership problem/issue that would turn those essential acts of artistic expression into poor relations/tails of the dog, etc.

[AllenLowe]

Joplin's too easy -

http://soundcloud.com/allenlowe-1/emancipation-rag

Edited October 10, 2012 by AllenLowe

[Chuck Nessa]

At this point WM is an important figure in the "market".

If you like him post positive things.

At this time enough negative stuff has been posted.

Unless he wants to give me a night at Lincoln Center I don't care.

This is almost a 30 year fight against the "retro" jazz. They won and the folks not agreeing can sneak off into the corner and do something better.

Please do that.

[jlhoots]

At this point WM is an important figure in the "market".

If you like him post positive things.

At this time enough negative stuff has been posted.

Unless he wants to give me a night at Lincoln Center I don't care.

This is almost a 30 year fight against the "retro" jazz. They won and the folks not agreeing can sneak off into the corner and do something better.

Please do that.

!!!

[AllenLowe]

I disagree. I have won. Just like that guy at the end of Dr. Strangelove -

Edited October 10, 2012 by AllenLowe

[robertoart]

I am surprised that I am even commenting on anything Wynton related. I have no use for his music at all.

I do respect his technical prowess on the horn. He is a phenomenal instrumentalist.

But his improv? He has never reached me emotionally. (I make the same observation re: Bill Watrous (whom I idolized and tried to emulate as a player when I was in my younger years)

No emotional substance. That is my opinion, but there it is.

I also have harbored a long running grudge against him ever since his Jazz Times interview/feature circa 1981 0r '82. In it I remember him stating that - and I paraphrase - "this is the black man's music and I won't play with white musicians"

If that isn't the exactly how he stated it, it is pretty close to the sentiment I gathered.

And from that point I had him pegged. I told myself: "okay then, this white musician will never spend a dime on your music"

So far so good. I do however have many of Branford's releases. And he reaches me emotionally.

There, I went ahead and acknowledged the white elephant in the middle of the room; reverse racism in jazz.

Then I suspect you would probably have to get rid of a lot of music from your collection (and collective listening experience). Because I'm sure the spirit of what Marsalis said - is/was -echoed publicly and privately by many Black American musicians.

The music is Wynton Marsalis's cultural heritage, how he chooses to respond and proceed with it is his business.

Nothing to do with the 'reverse racism' thing as you see it. Nothing whatsoever.

And obviously he has mediated that stance over the years. But it is obviously a cultural and political position Black American musicians keep returning too in one form or another.

I wonder why?

I am sure you are correct. I would have been really surprised to see the Art Ensemble with a white guy for instance.

The thing is, Wynton verbalized it. And yet, he turned right around and made a fortune (and a Grammy) playing classical music.....which really I have no problem with.

But it is the hypocrisy of the situation that chaps my ass.

Well I suppose another way to look at it might be this kind of hypothetical. Say Marsalis has a choice between two listeners. One a young African American listener, another someone else. I'm sure he would choose the African American listener for a myriad of reasons. One of which might be that the music as Marsalis sees it is more essential to the cultural-heritage (there's that word again), of the African American listener. Of course in an ideal world, Marsalis (and the Art Ensemble and everyone else) would claim both listeners. But I guess Marsalis can't control that outcome, but can control who he has on the bandstand at least. So I don't see it as a racist situation but one of cultural integrity. Not so much exclusion as inclusion, but an inclusion weighted towards culture not race. I just don't see the 'reverse racism' perspective as correct here. And I don't think there can be such a thing as reverse racism in a social or cultural situation where one race has a legacy of entrenched domination and supremacy over another.

Re- Allen Lowe's argument that both Black and White is his American cultural heritage, I think the history of the music as you play it - and continue re-imagining it -is your cultural heritage in a kind of Phenomenological way - but doesn't have the potential for the Ontological weight (and sense of historical urgency) it would carry for an African American person, although I admit (Allen) - you are a rare breed - who has 'a lot' of intellectual and music-cultural intensity invested in this argument. What would convince me more - is if there was a groundswell (or indeed any swell) in this discourse - from African American musicians and intellectuals themselves - saying something like - yeah, the music was basically ours - we thought it, we played it and we taught it to you (Non African Americans) - but now - seen as how we can all play it together - we can both (African American and Non-African American), claim an equal stake in it's future - because it now means the same to both of us. I just don't see those arguments coming from Black musicians. And I also don't think this is all really a bourgeois issue either, as you have previously implied. In the sense that I don't think being Black, privleged and closeted overrides this issue in terms of the essence of the cultural heritage legacy. It might (as you have said) from the perspective of creativity and formal advancements, but not from the most important thing.

Edited October 11, 2012 by freelancer

[robertoart]

I disagree. I have won. Just like that guy at the end of Dr. Strangelove -

No.

She's still got a frog in her throat.

[robertoart]

I mean, could any member of Morton's Red Hot Peppers have played on Bird's recording of "Klactoveedsedstene"? Or vice versa? Bird, maybe, if he was in the mood, because he was Bird -- but otherwise? And the gap there is only about 20 years.

Factoring in the very real impact of technology on information dissemination, my point is that a natural evolution such as this is part and parcel of "the human spirit" - but so is an enforced conformity/anti-evolution (aka "consistency") in the service of interests other than those of the immediate participants, one that is put into place to ensure control of both input and output.

At some point, resistance becomes futile and volunteered slavery sets in, which is all well and good as long as we know it for what it is. It's when it reaches the point where we think it's something other than that that fucks people up. That's what I'm seeing in LCJO, and that's what I've experienced in waaaay to much "classical" music.

Too bad, because there's some "fine music" there. But it's over as far as being relevant as anything other than an "institution", and jazz is irrevocably headed the same way. Watch it happen and ask yourself does history repeat itself, and if so, what can we learn from watching it do so.

But don't worry - there will come a time when Wise People speak of Ellington as Wise People Today speak of Mozart. The Tale shall be told, and believed, for All The Same Reasons too!

I hope I'm dead by then. I know the music will be.

And is there really an audience left for Jazz that isn't repertory in some way. In the sense that it's a sit down and listen experience. So even if the music is not repertory in itself, the listening environment is. Apart from that - in a small bar atmosphere - where the interaction is more 'active' - who is there to make up an audience beyond the vested interests of those involved in the 'academic music education culture, + the small number of contemporary boutique replicants of the club goers/audience who once were. Perhaps what sustains the music as a living entity - across the board - are the Jazz Festivals circuits? But these seem to be increasingly just excuses for any kind of 'roots' music experience - that often has little relevance to a Jazz improvising purpose. On the other hand, although Classical music is necessarily structured and interpretable within a narrower range of options, perhaps the long term future for the emergent 'Jazz Historical Canon' might be somewhat brighter - in the way that repertory in literature/theatre - like Shakespeare - is constantly re-invigorated and radicalised with each different generation. Jazz - with it's spaces for improvisational freedom - might be able to bridge the gap in similar ways. In the way that someone from Shakespeare's time may be able to recognise the words - but the contemporary context those words are put to use in are different dimensions. Which is I guess what Larry Kart and Allen Lowe are essentially saying re- Threadgill and Brecht. Although I'm also projecting this way way into the future. Admittedly, envisioning this kind of future for the 'canon', might be a kind of musical dystopia for many

Edited October 11, 2012 by freelancer

[AllenLowe]

well, coincidentally or not, I am currently working on a new "roots of the roots" project, as I said - and here's the opening manifesto (and I will still claim my own multi-cultural place n the music because, on most of the stuff below, Wynton et al have not a clue; so I might as well run with it):

"Another thing that has got me going in the last few months has been my own personal research into the 'roots of roots' music, so to speak, relative to the pointed emphasis in some academic writing on the African and African-Caribbean sources of American song. While I generally concur on the importance of these lineages, more and more I have come to the conclusion that the academic obsession with such is a form of avoidance of the more complexly layered (and often extremely disreputable) sources of the American vernacular. Meaning: if one looks at the direct autobiographical testimony of those who witnessed American song at early and crucial stages of its development- (like: Lafcadio Hearn, Kid Ory, Mance Lipscomb, the Kansas City oral histories, Louis Armstrong, Willie the Lion Smith, Baby Dodds, Cousin Joe, Jelly Roll Morton) one realizes that at a key time of the music's early development and documentation – the late 19^th and early 20^th century - cultural forces of great power (and of both bluntly religious virtue and deeply personal vice) are in play which, essentially, bury the African and African Caribbean influence under other not only methods of survival and pleasure, but also new ideas of rhythm and swing – not so much as to make those influences unrecognizable (the clave is a peripheral aspect of New Orleans' first jazz stirrings, and central to the rise of rock and roll; and the African-Caribbean triplet is central to jazz swing); but so as to change them into something very specifically American and radically different from the song forms we see in other parts of the post-African Diaspora.

American music exists in the 19^th century as a series of interlocking hybrid forms related most directly to Southern music but also to the rise of a class of professional songwriters and the marketing of sheet music. Also essential to our understanding of the spread of new American music is early African American migration North and West, the rise of music education, and the resultant training of musicians(both black and white) for public brass bands in the North and South. In the late 19^th through early 20^th century various strains of American music come together and then separate through vehicles of public entertainments: minstrel, circus and tent shows, brass band concerts, vaudeville and other mobile/travelling forms. As recording technology develops, these styles divide themselves into distinctly different forms of indigenous popular music – into ragtime and professional pop song (which overlap and include things like "coon" and ragtime songs a la Ernest Hogan, Al Bernard, Irving Berlin, George M. Cohan, Sophie Tucker, Arthur Collins, Bert Williams, Chris Smith, Shelton Brooks), the blues, jazz, and even pop/gospel. Into the 20^th century the music continues to change, and divide itself racially and stylistically. So we get hillbilly music (and there were black hillbillies) more generalized country forms (think breakdowns, shouts, early African American pre-bluegrass and then white bluegrass; and then essentially white forms like Western swing, country and western, honky tonk, et al); and African American songster forms that are closely related to both minstrel composition and folk sources, as well as to professionally published sheet music (as in the work of African American songwriters like Alec Rogers).

Jazz and the blues transform themselves from country forms into urban music, though of course their players co-exist with their country brethren, some of whom work hard (particularly in blues and songster forms) to maintain certain musical and social traditions (see John and Alan Lomax's incredible body of field recordings). White country music, indebted to its own religious and mountain aesthetic, absorbs, in its early years, both the blues and minstrel song traditions and splits itself into its own versions of sinner and saint.

In all of this and in these years of incredible musical ferment the African and African-Caribbean element is not so much discarded as it is buried under a tidal wave of American culture. What some see as a "watering down" of black music I see as a natural progression, the development of a pop aesthetic that is truly multicultural in the American way, and which leads to a complicated layering of black and white influences and performance practices. All of which is informed, in its rhythms, tonality, social applications, and textual meaning (and in a way that is both close to yet psychologically distant from its African roots), by an essentially and pervasively African American aesthetic. "

Edited October 11, 2012 by AllenLowe

[sonnymax]

At this point WM is an important figure in the "market".

If you like him post positive things.

At this time enough negative stuff has been posted.

Unless he wants to give me a night at Lincoln Center I don't care.

This is almost a 30 year fight against the "retro" jazz. They won and the folks not agreeing can sneak off into the corner and do something better.

Please do that.

Or, I respectfully suggest that people who find no value in such discussions avoid them altogether. Try that.

[fasstrack]

What Chuck said. It's amazing that this discussion is still going on, and people's backs are still getting up over what no one generally cares about in the states, less than no one in Europe, and few in the jazz world anywhere anymore (especially musicians-trust me on that. 10-15 yrs. ago, maybe). To paraphrase an illustrious new member 'dead topic walking'. I mean if it floats your boats go ahead. It's my opinion, no more or less. I just think it time wasted and better spent on other things like, say, getting kids to like live music-so jazz and other musics will have an audience 25-30 yrs. from now.

[Teasing the Korean]

What Chuck said. It's amazing that this discussion is still going on...

Go back through the thread and you will see the conversation quickly changed from Wynton specifically to the concept of "repertory" jazz in general, which is a much more interesting conversation. I could care less about Wynton, but I am fascinated by contemporary culture's collective obsession with its own recent past, and I readily admit to being guilty of participating in this phenomenon. Repertory jazz is one of its many manifestations.

Edited October 11, 2012 by Teasing the Korean

[Quasimado]

When Fass does not agree with someone's post (as is often the case), he reaches into his bag of indignant reactions and pulls out the "mean-spirited" label.

Seems to fit - can't you guys get over this shit?

Q

I don't think there's anything for us to "get over". A lot of us don't like Wynton, what he's done, and what he stands for. Perhaps it's Wynton's fans who need to "get over" the fact that not everyone shares their adulation for the man.

I'm not a Wynton fan in any way. I just think it's sad that the same people get themselves in a knot over this guy again and again. You know (I presume) the number of times this has ocurred. Has anything changed? Nothing. More verbiage, and jazz stays put or moves on, according to whose perspective it is... Does it really matter? I seriously don't think so. He does what he does, some benefit, some don't like it. What's new in the world?

(I also think Freelancer has a point ...).

Q

[AllenLowe]

I am not in a knot over Wynton - more like a gently twisted soft pretzel.

[JSngry]

Although I'm also projecting this way way into the future. Admittedly, envisioning this kind of future for the 'canon', might be a kind of musical dystopia for many

I'm kinda like, if you want to hear the records, listen to the records, don't bother with somebody else performing the records. That's just lame.

And if you want to "re-envision" (or whatever word there is to use), just do it. It matters more if you don't tell anybody and just let it stand on its own with "pleading the case".

[Larry Kart]

At this point WM is an important figure in the "market".

If you like him post positive things.

At this time enough negative stuff has been posted.

Unless he wants to give me a night at Lincoln Center I don't care.

This is almost a 30 year fight against the "retro" jazz. They won and the folks not agreeing can sneak off into the corner and do something better.

Please do that.

In addition to whatever else might be involved, the initial marketing of WM and all that came in its wake was perhaps the most remarkable piece of social engineering I've ever witnessed directly and in an area that I care about a great deal. Further, it involved a number of people whom I respected, even loved, saying and doing things that I knew and they knew they did not in their own knowledgable hearts and minds believe to be true. In particular, I still can't forget the time one of WM's more prominent defenders in the jazz community told me, "Wynton is not a jazz musician" -- and he then said, "Don't ever tell anyone that I said that." I still find this disturbing and, as I do about what I mentioned in the first sentence, ominous. In effect, then, while there is an actual WM, a "him" who produces actual music, etc., and can be liked or disliked on that basis, in my view it's the underlying pattern involved here -- that what is IMO a "big lie" has become a generally accepted part of (as Jim Sangrey might say) our CULTURE -- that still bothers the heck of out me, still has not been adequately understood, and is the kind of thing that has cropped and probably will continue to crop up all over the map, far far away from J@LC.

[AllenLowe]

well said Larry; my wife was asking me to explain recently what was wrong with the whole JALC/WM thing and I got a little tongue tied; I found it hard to explain as something more than just a personal discomfort; I intend to send her your explanation, above.

though I did manage to explain the awful way in which he was used (at his own behest, trust me) in the Jazz documentary to black out (or maybe I should say white out so as to avoid charges of insensitivity) such a big chunk of jazz history. To me, that was one of the most offensive results of what Larry refers to.

Edited October 11, 2012 by AllenLowe

[flat5]

I remain convinced that WM is a very good jazz musician when he wants to be.

Larry, I have not followed him as you have. I don't know what the big lie is.