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mrjazzman

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Some of the best live improvised music I’ve heard on a given night also included sections or sequences of music that irritated, bored or even upset me.

a few weeks back I heard 2 improvised sets of continuous music from a quartet (saxophone, piano, bass & drums) that ranged from a few sections of time that were relatively unsuccessful to a closing 15-20 minute section that was among the most exciting and substantial live music I’ve heard over the last few years. Certainly for listeners not interested in freely improvised music portions of this might have sounded like a construction site but I’ve (and many others) been listening to “challenging” improvised music for quite a while and I think we can discern good from bad or accomplished from amateur and certainly we know certain musicians take significant risks and those risks sometime don’t pay off and sometimes the payoffs take an hour or more.

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I most often listen to music within my "comfort zone", which isn't terribly narrow, but I know what it is, and we all have one. Endless listening experimentation is not for me. However, I sometimes feel the need to go outside my comfort zone, perhaps 5% of the time. Sometimes I am quite pleased with what I hear, more often than not.  

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Comfort zones...sometimes I hear things that make me uncomfortable with how comfortable they feel. Checking out "country gospel" or whatever it's called from the 50s-early 70s was a fairly recent case. Uncomfortable, because I knew all too well what was "in the air" about that music and those people. Yet, comfortable because I did know about that music and those people, they were in my "air", because life puts you where you are, right?

Same thing with The Beach Boys 40 or so years ago, you know, it's 1976, I'm all about jazz militancy, what the fuck do I need with this uber-White Surf Music? But hell, it was on the radio when once again, life had put me where I was.

Dislike is easy. Objectively evaluating is less easy, but still not really that admirable. What's really hard is disliking, then objectively understanding the music, and then seeing what the music means in reference to from whence it comes, and then experiencing it as a specific form of basic humanity. The whole "mixed feelings" thing is about as honest as you can get, imo, because I've no doubt that somebody like, say, Jake Hess might have had a certain engagement with all sorts of socio-political things that are anathema to me, but otoh, that man could sing, and sing with the soul of his unique circumstances. I can accept both of those things, comfort zones be damned. People are flawed, all people, to one degree or another. It's no longer my desire to either excuse that or hate on it, it's my job to find all of the truth there, and there seems to always be come conflicting truths in people. There's something between somebody being either all friend or all enemy, you know? In fact, I think I'd rather have few friends, and just as few enemies, I can live with that.

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I've gone both ways on the comfort zone issue.

In classical music, I was for a long time a "new music enthusiast" and constantly listened to highly avant-garde/exploratory works. But I listen to much less of that now (for instance, I more or less concluded that orthodox Darmstadt-style serialism is not to my taste). I still look for new (to me) areas, though: Renaissance polyphony is a big recent interest.

Relative newcomer to jazz (only in the past 15 years did I listen to much outside of Miles). Started out very much straight-ahead bop/hard-bop, but branched out quite a bit over time (Sun Ra is a recent interest) and have begun to find some hard-bop a little stale. I enjoy stuff that stretches boundaries with awareness of bop/hard-bop roots (e.g. the new Braxton Parker box is interesting, but too pricey so I will stick with the old 2 disc set). I'm still a little leery about far-"out" jazz, because some of the sound worlds explored (Bill Dixon for instance; no disrespect intended, just a matter of taste) remind me of the modern classical that I tired of.

The way I became a jazz enthusiast early this millennium was funny...Bought my father a Proper box ("Bebop Spoken Here" iirc), listened and was intrigued by the Tadd Dameron tunes. Bought the Coltrane/Dameron "Mating Call" and kept going. I found almost infinite amounts of jazz that was new to me (didn't even know of Horace Silver or what "hard bop" meant at the time), and I overall enjoyed it much more than the avant classical I'd been listening to.

I still explore enough so that current tastes are not carved in stone.

Edited by T.D.
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I think it's best in the pursuit of getting to the point where inconsistencies in others are no longer viewed as conflicts within yourself. Because people you love be stooped crazy sometimes. And you ain't ever gonna change that.

I don't know that evaluation is in and of itself that great of an end, it's more like means to an end, so...once started, don't stop there, that's all I'm saying.

Call it the Dave Gardner Paradox. :)

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3 hours ago, JSngry said:

I don't know that evaluation is in and of itself that great of an end, it's more like means to an end, so...once started, don't stop there, that's all I'm saying.

Knowing where you are isn't enough. Not in the end - Sure.

But you have to get to where you can speak. Not so easy.

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On 06/03/2018 at 10:19 PM, Rooster_Ties said:

 

tumblr_inline_oshdx2OO4K1qbp9pm_500.jpg

What's the name of the alto player at bottom right? He looks like a friend of mine.

MG

On 07/03/2018 at 11:35 AM, Dan Gould said:

Put me down for the zone of comfort.  I know what I like and why I like it. Life's too short and money is too tight when there is still new or new-to-me recordings that I can reasonably anticipate enjoying.

Yeah. The well-to-do can line up outside their personal comfort zones if they like.

My comfort zone keeps expanding but, in a sense, it's all pop music; just the pop music of different bunches of foreigners. But if the art of great musicians is that their music can get through to an audience which has little or zero musical education, then it's got to be doing so via the essence of pop music, whether it's from Senegal, Ghana, Congo, Dominican Republic, or Newark NJ.

MG

Oh and for each of these where's there's a when, because things change.

And I haven't yet got around to Brazil or Colombia. May do so before I croak.

MG

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15 minutes ago, The Magnificent Goldberg said:

 

Yeah. The well-to-do can line up outside their personal comfort zones if they like.

 

I don't think its only the well-to-do though. I'm just pointing out that with limited disposable income I lost my appetite for exploration a while back.

I doubt Larry or Chuck consider themselves well-to-do but they retain that adventurousness for which I can't muster up the interest.

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When I lived in the Twin Cities nearly 30 years ago, I got to know a tenor player named Scot Fultz who was in a Hank Mobley inspired band called Straight No Filter (among his many ongoing projects) who I'd see often and hype shamelessly in City Pages.  I kinda feel the same way about Jacknife (who probably aren't quite as good) as I did about them, I'm glad the're doing it and I'd be happy to see them in a local bar but to think the're of national significance, no.  I enjoy comfort food as much as the next guy, but it loses its comforting effect for me if it's all I have, YMMV.  But then I just ate a PB & honey sandwich for breakfast, something I do several times a week, make of that what you will.

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3 minutes ago, danasgoodstuff said:

When I lived in the Twin Cities nearly 30 years ago, I got to know a tenor player named Scot Fultz who was in a Hank Mobley inspired band called Straight No Filter (among his many ongoing projects) who I'd see often and hype shamelessly in City Pages.  I kinda feel the same way about Jacknife (who probably aren't quite as good) as I did about them, I'm glad the're doing it and I'd be happy to see them in a local bar but to think the're of national significance, no.  I enjoy comfort food as much as the next guy, but it loses its comforting effect for me if it's all I have, YMMV.  But then I just ate a PB & honey sandwich for breakfast, something I do several times a week, make of that what you will.

Now I'd go out a lot more often if I could find a bar that had a Hank Mobley cover band.

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2 minutes ago, Dan Gould said:

Now I'd go out a lot more often if I could find a bar that had a Hank Mobley cover band.

I did and loved it, but I was obviously much younger then.  They even let me read my Hank Mobley poem at a gig and I have it on tape and treasure it but it's not like I think the world needs to hear that.  Maybe if I or they got famous for something else then that old tape would be significant.

 

2 minutes ago, Dan Gould said:

Now I'd go out a lot more often if I could find a bar that had a Hank Mobley cover band.

 

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