AllenLowe

Face - my blues chonicle, 1890-1959, will be out this Fall, as a finish to my original blues history (which only had 9 CDs come out and was never completely issued); I really deal with it mostly on a musical basis, but I cover everything from Will Marion Cook to Jaki Byard, with lotsa country in between; even a Charles Ives piece and Copeland. I'd be happy to send you the text if you like; everything is mastered on CDRS, as well.

well I prefer the word "pointed" - but actually, I think he was posting 2005-2011's schedule.

I think you made a mistake and posted last year's schedule.

I never liked two-piano albums. Too confusing; can't tell who's doing what to whom; like an orgy gone bad.

thanks for posting that. I am still a Red Camper.

I wish......

it never occured to me to give it out publicly; she called me, I'm trying to help. Doesn't have to be paypal, but that's quick and easy and safe. I've used it before to help people on this forum, as a matter of fact.

I don't really know if the Foundation is assisting - I'm gonna send them some cash, anyway.

I just got a call from Antoinette, who lives with Kalaparusha; he's in Belleview, downtown, after open heart surgery, and is stable but unconscious. She needs some help, and I'm going to to send a little bit this week; if people out there are willing, I would be happy to collect anything else I can and send it to her - we can do it through my paypal account, or however else - send me a private email at allenlowe5@gmail.com if you are able to assist -

well, I will say that years ago Crouch wrote an article in the New Republic about the movie Bird, and it was a brilliant piece; and I am told by people who have seen this book that the research he did for it is quite important. So, you never know.....

that's actually counter to what Dick Katz told me; he was one of the last pianists to work with Sonny.

thanks Larry; somewhere I have a transcript of a long interview I did with Johnny; we definitely touched on Wolpe, but I haven't looked at that interview in 20 years.

I wouldn't disavow the CD in that book - if you want Paramounts, which are so varied in quality, you should get as many different transfers as possible. And I think Wardlow's book is essential in its own way; he was the one who finally figured out who King Solomon Hill was; and that's no mean feat.

I like her 50s playing a lot - almost Tristano-ish on the stuff with Hasselgarde; also, there's a 1980s LP (maybe Bluenote) in which she just plays, that's quite good.

I agree; I use it mostly for Tony's stuff.

I'm going to give a little sample of my book, from the first section, because I try to adress, in it, what I consider to be some of the weaknesses of most approaches to blues history: "But beyond this, Armstrong, like Jabbo Smith, is the perfect and most specific answer to those who run in fear from the historical specter of American minstrelsy, and who see the blues as the great uncompromised leveler of racial expression (and as the great historical response to minstrelsy). First of all, listen to the singing of both those great musicians, Armstrong and Smith. It is deep and complicated and gloriously melodic, in a very American yet other worldly (read African Ancestral) sense, representing possibly the most radical restructuring of American popular song of the 20th century; but not necessarily, or only, a blue reconstruction. The perfectly, artfully coordinated slurs, the speech-impedimented inexactitude of the vocal rhythms, the uncanny coordination of the voices as they ruminate over and around the connective tissue of vernacularized speech, the sly, in-group re-writing and re–emphasis of lyrics, the great glissandos that emit from their voices and spread through the air like a maze of concentric and reversible water slides – where did this all come from? Sorry, but it certainly did not come from the blues, and an argument can be made for just the opposite, because these things really came from much older black habits of singing, talking and speaking, and these things acted on the blues as they acted on all of American song. And they were also likely based on neo-African ideas of rhythm and tonality mixed with (in a submerged, subterranean way) certain oblique aspects of Afro-Caribbean/Haitian rhythms and voodoo/trance sources (which are beyond the scope of this study, though there are many materials available for those who have an interest), leavened by ragtime and its own lesser-known barrelhouse song origins and habanera-isms, and modified and then recast as part of an oral tradition newly rejuvenated by both the literal and figurative use of instrumental techniques, all as applied (and vice versa) to triadic harmony and country modality. The blues is in there somewhere, I agree, but it is submerged in the obscure cultural leftovers of racial/ethnic cause and effect. Furthermore, Armstrong and Jabbo’s singing was not the only sign or symbol of this radical restructuring of American pop. It was also captive of the thousands of black and white musicians who populated minstrel stages in the 19th century and into the 20th (for a clue and more as to the essentialness of this black entertainment continuum, read Tom Fletcher’s 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business, Lynn Abbot and Doug Serroff’s books on the black show tradition, Ragged But Right and Out of Sight. or the book Old Slack's Reminiscences). Evidence of it was all around, in everything from Ben Harney to Al Bernard to Arthur Collins, Bert Williams to George Walker to Marian Harris, Ethel Waters, and Sophie Tucker; in the work of all the roadside and juking entertainers of the rural and urban American and (primarily but not only ) Southern and Southwestern Diaspora; in the songs and dances of the street entertainers, street quartets and street merchants of New Orleans (where Armstrong got his first tastes, I would say, of more than one form of entertainment); in the street performers of old New York and their Afro-minstrel dances (see W.T. Lhamon’s revelatory book Raising Cain on the complicated ways of these archaically modern minstrel, Eastern street theaters); in those who entertained, as a book of nearly the same title calls it, “by gaslight,” in dingy old caverns in places like old New York, financed and lubricated by drugs, alcohol, and prostitution. This music and its cause and effects just do not fit neatly into academic or popular historical categories; listen to Jelly Roll Morton talk to Alan Lomax for the library of Congress, to his profane and sexually transmitted content, which ranges further down into and casts a wider shadow than we might want to acknowledge over the less reputable sources of the blues, by way of African American folklore (shades, by the way, of Zora Neale Hurston, with her face-down, naked induction into the Voodoo cult and her matter-of-fact singing about the oversexed Uncle Bud). If you don’t shake you don’t get no cake, Jelly Roll tells us via Lomax, but if you don’t rock you don’t get no cock, and, furthermore, if you don’t fuck you’re out of luck. And that’s not necessarily the blues, to Jelly Roll, but where the blues comes from, a minstrel/showbiz concoction of street philosophy, talkin’ dirty, musical alleys, and the advancing consciousness of the new negro (before The New Negro), the tainted white collar world of the musical professional. Newly codified harmonically, it is also out of a world beyond Jelly Rolls’s immediate experience or knowledge, out of the underground’s underground, so to speak, of radically personalized reflection, especially as it surfaces in the freshly composed works of new and emerging Delta countercultural poets like Charley Patton and Son House (per Lawrence Levine, the most revolutionary aspect of the blues was its turn away from the more communal tendencies of African American song to a more individualized musical form of personal musical expression). Add the informal but deadly-serious methods of African American field communication (we can’t forget the holler and cry), multiply it tenfold by the sound of the sanctified church (which was blue but not really blue, more a stomping and circular shout of group feeling) and you do, indeed, have something resembling the roots of the blues. Really. "

he has an old title on black and white blues players - can't think of the name right off.

I think Palmer is over-rated; there's just not enough non-convenional insight. Lomax is problematic; Oliver good but dull and lacking deep insignt. Larry Cohn's book is great. The problem with a lot of the work in the field is that the writers lack anything but blues perspective. the best living writer on blues and country, I think, is Tony Russell. Far and away. Gayle Dean Wardlow is great, as far as he goes. the best thing, really, is to listen to the music and decide for yourself. There is too much ideology in the field. I daresay, immodestly, that my little e-book will be the most thorough book around. (I think, btw, that Marybeth Hamilton's book is excellent and largely misunderstood)

the rest of my chronicle of the blues (1890--1959) will be out in the fall as an e-book, with a link to listen to the cuts listed. Also my rock and roll history, which deals with concurrent musical issues.

the point is: that there's a whole genre of pop spiritual, that goes back to gospel music written for the minstrel stage, of which Lonesome Road is a prime late example; the documentary purports that Rosetta was in the middle of a conflict between the performance of secular music and religius music, and uses Lonesome Rod as an example of the triumph of the religious over the secular; when in reaitiy it is not, but rather part of the whole "corruption" of religious song, This whole movement, of pop influence on religious song, helped create singers like Tharpe (and Ray Charles and Nappy Brown, even John Lee Hoooker). The white Jewishness of the songwriter (Nat Shilkret, who was a bandleader and worked for Victor) is cited because it's ironic that a documentary that purports to be a scholarly examination of her life is so clueless as to not only the big picture of this type of song, but to the reality that here was a black singer with a Sanctified background singing something that was so ensconced in the commercial songwriting world. Instead Lonesome Road is used as background, soundtrack music that is supposed to show her being pulled in the direction of the church.

I was the first to write about her in the post roots world, in American Pop, which came out around 1995; though the documentary was sincere, they missed a lot of important aspects of the whole gospel thing; most obviously, they kept citing Look Down the Long and Lonseome Road (or whatever the exact title is) as an example of her sacred work; well, that song was written by a white Jewish guy and was firmly ensconced in the post-minstrel, pop/gospel tradition, which is, really, a whole other (but central) subject,

yes, envy motivates my criticism of Wayne Shorter; after all, I was this close to getting that gig with Miles..... you see guys, it ain't envy unless the one who is making the comments pictures himself in the same position; if you can show this in my criticisms, then it is envy. But you think it's envy because you disagree with me; because by your standard I also envy: George Bush I and II, Kenny G, Three's Company, The Mickey Mouse Club, The Tea Party, Sarah Palin, George Romney. so fuck you, blue train.

well, I once shared the back of a VW bug with Moncur (about 1976), not kidding; no theory about Wayne's progress or regress, except I do remember that he once scared an interviewer from Cadence. I've shared front seats with Joe Albany, Al Haig, and Barry Harris. Strange that they were all bebop pianists. Didn't effect me stylistically at all. Though they all seemed to loosen up a bit while I was zooming down the highway.

wait; everything she said including "Allen Lowe's predictably ridiculous one" ? Geez Val, the last time you mentioned me it was to feign indignation at what you interpreted as a "personal attack" on you. to be most honest, Shorter, one of the great figures in jazz history, is now fuckin' nuts and everybody knows it, even if they don't want to say so in public; and his music is dull, brittle, and predictable. Much like Valerie's posts. and Jeff and I disagree all the time. But we respect each other's judgment (even when it's in error).

better early BeeGees LP was the one with Harry Braff.