AllenLowe

I like cutting and pasting, Dave; it's one of those post-word-processor options that makes me feel like I'm saving time. As for military service and musicians, a good question, though the divide may be generational - those of Curley Russell's generation did anything they could to avoid the military (it was Curley who told me that most of Benny Carter's band took a drug concoction to make their blood pressure go haywire in order to get physical deferments; also, think of Lester Young and his experiences). On the other hand, more of those of Braxton's generation served (I think). In re, once again, the place of the music and its social context - I have long felt that the music can certainly hold it's own, outside of such "contextualization;" The usefulness of social integration into histories is, IMHO, that they do help to illuminate the aesthetic. So, yes, it can and should be done, but VERY carefully in order to avoid tha academic crapola that has been spewed in the name of jazz history.

ah, but to all the above - Devilin Tune does indeed succeed by looking primarily at the music - as even Tom Hull, whom I believe is a Marxistl agrees - here are some quotes from the book, as pulled from Hull's site when he reviewed it: (this shows, I believe, how it CAN be done): When it comes to the study of jazz and some of the things that have been said about the music, it's tempting, but not really fair, to say that everyone is wrong. Sometimes they're wrong by omission and sometimes by commission, by not only what they say and what they claim, but by what they leave out, what they don't know about or what they think they do know. So when Wynton Marsalis declares, about jazz, in an issue of the magazine of Jazz Times, that "the music was always based around melody. Solos didn't come into fashion until Louis Armstrong," one has to wonder where he got his information. The exact origins of jazz are obscure and the original sounds of jazz or jazz-like playing are unknown. Certainly early jazz was about much more than melody, it was about rhythm and sonority, texture, and invention; and the truth is, many of the earliest jazz performances contain solos. And we can guess about other aspects of the music's origins, but we have to understand and acknowledge that we are guessing, even if we do so with knowledge and research. (p. 12): American popular music is a complex and wonderfully multi-faceted organism. The range of vernacular music which has emerged in the United States is astonishing in its natural and unselfconscious multicultural diversity, in the way it has subsisted on both a folk and commercial realm. Though, once again, the jazz world is fond of saying that its music is America's sole original artistic contribution, they leave out, at their own historic peril, country and hillbilly music, ragtime and show music, minstrelsy and Tin Pan Alley, not to mention gospel, rhythm and blues and rock and roll. This kind of snobbery is endemic to jazz, indicative of attitudes that, ironically, mirror the kind of snobbery and isolation that jazz itself faced in its formative years. . (p. 22): Grossly underestimated (actually, generally unmentioned) in most jazz histories is the tradition of the African American string band. This tradition, though myopically ignored by early record producers, may be, in its merger with the wind ensemble,t he truest key to the development of jazz as both a specific discipline and as an art form. The image of the brass and marching band may have more of a visceral and romantic appeal, but the tempering effect on early dance music of the combination of brass and string sonorities is probably closer, in its aesthetic lineage, to jazz's actual birth. This yin-yang combination of string and brass is evident all over the African Diaspora, particularly in the Caribbean and other parts of the Americas, where American companies recorded black performers well before 1920. Early combos made up of black musicians in Puerto Rico, in Cuba, Trinidad, and Brazil and recorded in the first part of the 20th century offer fascinating glimpses of the African method in both collision with and in isolation from Euro forces, in the throes of publicly issued declarations of cultural independence. These groups may lack the particular and peculiar influence of ragtime (and, thus, a specifically jazz-like lineage), but they do not show that the musical idea of tempered steel and brass was far from new. (p. 33): One early type of song included in the general ragtime category was the cakewalk. The cakewalk had legitimate slave/plantation origins, as an early form of black dance that parodied the ruling class. It was a lowbrow corruption of highbrow ambition, a cynical take on the false Southern aristocracy's idea of cultivated posturing in pseudo-European dances. These stiff-backed steps were grist for the mill of slave satire, though, in creating a caricature of the master's pretensions, slaves turned white laughter upon both whites and upon themselves. On the one hand the cakewalk was a sharp depiction of white vanity, of the absurdity of people trying to develop cultivated sensibilities in the midst of something as depraved as slavery; on the other hand whites, who loved watching blacks assume high-falutin' poses while wearing raggedy-fancy clothes, saw in these slave shows not themselves but something which would become a minstrel prototype: the hopelessly and hilariously deluded Negro with designs upon a class status he could never, by his very nature, achieve. Late in the 19th century the cakewalk became another Tin Pan Alley spinoff of ragtime, a form of instrumental ragtime song. No longer a plantation phenomenon, it was now just another commercial hook, one held in some contempt by today's more formalist critics of ragtime. It may, however, have greater significance, as not only an early type of American popular song but as a route to the development of jazz. (p. 111): Though the phrase would not be applied to a jazz movement for over twenty years, the first real birth of the cool took place in the 1920s, among a very select group of white musicians. It may be an exaggeration to call this a movement; the titular leader of these sometimes only loosely connected musicians was cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, who was unsuited by habit and temperament to actually lead. But lead he did, however inadvertently, becoming a spiritual medium through which a number of very young white men found artistic deliverance. (p. 131): White country musicians like John Dilleshaw or the groups of H. M. Barnes shared with blacks a great wealth of musical tradition. Though not always apparent on recordings, the truth of this common musical heritage has emerged through the years, leaked by personal testimony and non-commercial field recordings and shown by the work of black hillbillies. The racial twain certainly did meet, if not always for public consumption, and not all historians, white or black, are comfortable with the evidence. Left to their own devices white and black instrumentalists could sound eerily alike, non-ideological participants in the first, if unofficial, New South movement. (p. 143): For inspiration [benny] Goodman may have looked, if he looked at all, to Coleman Hawkins, whose vertical harmonic dodges were mapped in increasingly coherent and horizontal ways, and in more and less abstract ways, a song's harmony. But that influence, if it really ever existed with Goodman, was probably only peripheral. In truth he was one of the freest and most advanced improvisers of the 1920s, whose innovative ideas involved the development of an increasingly broken-field style of running chord changes and an elongation and smoothing out of the natural properties of the jazz melodic line. Like their contemporaries in various European modernist movements and like advocates of free verse (think of William Carlos Williams and "the variable foot") all of these musicians sought (if more intuitively, with less need of manifestoes, and less intellectual rationalization) techniques to fight their way out of the narrow boxes of hitherto acceptable form. (p. 149): The jazz soloist of the new age was a grappler, a wrestler with those elements -- melody, harmony, and rhythm -- that defined his musical universe. Jazz, always an intensely inter-active music, became even more so as the normally subordinate roles of bassist, drummer, and accompanying pianist or guitarist began to change, to become, increasingly, harmonically and rhythmically pro-active. [Louis] Armstrong was never really part of these changes. He reigned as Babe Ruth in an age of Ty Cobb, circling the bases with a smile and a gracious nod as others sweated and slid their way around them. Things might have been different had he not achieved the kind of fame which made his accompanists afterthoughts in the minds of both his manager and his public. It's difficult, however, to imagine how a talent of his kind -- magnetic, electrically charged, infinitely expansive -- could ever have been contained in the confines of work-a-day group jazz. Instead he became a model for a new jazz star system, for the incoming of that developing pre-war generation, like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Tommy Dorsey. (pp. 165-166): The five or so years previous to [benny] Goodman's success seem, in hindsight, like the years of a ripening big band conspiracy, as though the building of the jazz-band edifice and the establishment of its stylistic hegemony in the public psyche were part of a plan which, with Benny's 1935 broadcasts, came suddenly and overwhelmingly to fruition. Listen to Ben Pollack (Two Tickets To Georgia) in 1933, to Bennie Moten's 1930s band, some of Red Nichols' 1931 ensembles, Arthur Schutt's arrangements for Goodman's "Bill Dodge" sessions from 1934, Fletcher Henderson's 1930-31 band, [Jack] Teagarden's 1933 Plantation Moods, or Sy Oliver's [Jimmie] Lunceford pieces, and you have the swing era in much more than just embryo. Listen to bands after 1935 and you experience an odd consistency, a series of jazz likenesses which have to do not only with commercial copycatting but with jazz reaching, and starting to tentatively cross, a new musical bridge. It was now officially out of the margins of popular entertainment. The new move to the commercial center stimulated not only a rush of artistic advance but a trend toward artistic stasis, thereby planting with repetition and formulaic redundancy, the seeds of the next (bebop) revolution. (pp. 175-176): We sometimes forget that music of nearly any form responds, at its root, to factors that are beyond the reach of history, that are much more than just reflections of such things as class and race and economics, or shifting demographics and migratory habits. Musical form and content change because they have to, because the process of making music of any kind is so all consuming of both the musician and the music. A style alters or modifies itself when its characteristic gestures become cliché, when it begins to repeat itself, to show signs that it has worn out its aesthetic welcome; such is the one of the most basic of human artistic impulses, to challenge prior assumptions of form and idea. Just as the Delta blues changed at the hands of Robert Johnson, who knew instinctively that the original form begged for change and redirection and that it had gone, stylistically, almost as far as it could go, so did jazz react to the need for the expansion of formats and styles that had nearly exhausted themselves: Louis Armstrong found a way out of the narrow confines of New Orleans polyphony; Coleman Hawkins, with Armstrong's help, freed the saxophone from its slap-happy, circus past; Lester Young, facing a generation of Hawkins disciples, showed that there were aesthetic alternatives for the playing of the saxophone; Bix Beiderbecke, admiring early white trumpeters who had reached something of a stylistic dead end, showed everyone that there was another way to hear the music, that one had neither to remain entrapped in a neo-Dixieland desert or simply emulate Louis Armstrong. Large aspects of white jazz in the 1920s were the product of an aesthetic counterculture, and there are many more examples, black and white. Each illustrates, as critic Richard Gilman has said, that the act of artistic creation, at its best, constitutes a counter-history, the generation of a psychological and aesthetic alternative to the prevailing artistic and social order. (p. 194): As we've pointed out, change was in the air in those years [early 1940s], in the atmosphere of recording studios and some of the after-hours Harlem clubs like Minton's or Monroe's Uptown House. Musicians were feeling their way toward new means of expression, into a harmonic system that incorporated seemingly odd and difficult intervals as well as clashing dissonances, that integrated these changing tonal elements into more irregular patterns of rhythm and that placed accents in less predictable places, on less predictable beats. [Thelonious] Monk was very much in the center of all this. If he didn't have the same kind of fleet, right-hand-emphasizing solo style that some of the new generation had, he had the requisite harmonic acumen, the ability to substitute chords of sometimes remote relationship to the original harmony, and a rhythmic mastery that allowed him to accent in all of what seemed like the wrong places while maintaining complete equilibrium. If this threw some late night jammers for a loop, if it confused them and forced them from the stage, well, then, that was just to bad -- no, actually, that was the point and purpose, to separate the new from the old, or at least, the older. (p. 195): All that, however, puts the cart somewhat before the horse. 1940s modernism came from many directions and led not just to bebop but to a whole post-War smorgasbord of musical styles. Another new sound was emerging from the big band and blues echoes of the Swing Era, and though it appealed, at first, largely to African American audiences, the long-term commercial implications for both black and white musicians and audiences were great. Louis Jordan, preceded and strongly influenced by groups like the Harlem Hamfats, was one of the first to appreciate its possibilities, as it appropriated basic swing and shuffle rhythms in the service of relatively simple chord progression -- sometimes the blues, sometimes the old standby I Got Rhythm, sometimes even the old ragtime changes -- and lyrics that found hooks in often humorous and leering ways. When Louis Jordan sang, as he made love to a [woman] in secret, "there ain't nobody here but us chickens," and Wynonie Harris, with Lucky Millinder's band, wondered "who put the whiskey in the well?," it became clear that something different was coming into popular focus, and with it a new music of novelty and irresistible swing. (p. 212): Bebop was not an avant garde movement in the same deep cultural sense as the European rebellions of the 1910s and 1920s, but this may have been so because it lacked an effective propagandist, a social theorist to place it in an appropriately revolutionary context. That would come much later, in the revisionist historical battles waged by some jazz critics in the post-1960s era. But it was an avant garde movement in the sense that it now placed jazz in the theoretical running; it made allowances, for the first time in any systematic way in jazz, for new kinds of dissonance based on either intervals or stacked intervals, for methods that seemed, musically, non-representational by virtue of their sometimes surprising and sometimes even shocking juxtapositions of harmony, scale, and rhythm. Bebop was, in other words, a challenge to the established musical order, and [through] it, like nearly all modernist movements, eventually settled into routine predictability, for a time it had the same powerful impetus as the earlier European avant garde, becoming, by virtue of its challenge to basic notions of tonal and rhythmic consonance, a truly revolutionary phenomenon. Charlie Parker was its leader and most potent symbol. Though Dizzy Gillespie, possibly because of both his longevity and relative accessibility, has suffered some historical neglect, the truth is that, brilliant as he was, he didn't inspire the same kind of reverence and awe in fellow musicians as did Parker. Dizzy was the trumpeter of the era, however, and a sign of his greatness is the dearth of other trumpet players who have worked directly in the Gillespie style, who are able to come anywhere near not only his amazing facility in the upper register but his complete mastery of the instrument. He inspired many others, but inspiration was not enough to permit any kind of real or accurate imitation. (p. 250): As much as some people struggled, the musical Luddites, against the radical changes (both technical and commercial) in jazz, the music continued to advance with the momentum of artistic inevitability -- and jazz, despite some protestations, was now a full-fledged art music, albeit one with a typically ambiguous relationship to the pressures of marketing and sales. The descriptive cliché of jazz's origins -- that it represented a collision of European and African aesthetics and techniques -- was finally an apt one, as new musicians stealthily adapted more formal aspects of their musical training to jazz's sometimes ephemeral and spontaneous purposes. Still, this idea of a Euro-African fusion made more sense when applied to places other than America, like, for instance, Argentina, in which the traditional tango was undergoing the kind of radical transformation that swing had undergone in the middle 1940s. Bandoneon player Astor Piazzolla, who would, in later years, rise to a level of international fame and find himself admired by more than one jazz musician, was already, by the late 1940s, composing in a way that, intentionally or not, paralleled jazz's orchestral expansion and integration of planned and spontaneous moments. His was a very different kind of annexation of Latino rhythms to jazz ends, too subtle in its implications to have, like Chano Pozo, a broad and multicultural effect, but too musically significant and far ranging to ignore. (p. 257): Before he died (in 1955) Charlie Parker left some tantalizing hints of not just what the future would bring, but what the future was. In many respects the future was everywhere in jazz of the late 1940s, in things like the pulsing, lined-out improvisations of Lennie Tristano and in the curt harmonic frisking of standard chord progressions by Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh; it was there in the densely layered compositions of George Russell and Charles Mingus, the "tone paintings" of Dodo Marmarosa, the uncannily sensitive stage-whispers (both individual and collaborative) of Miles Davis and Gil Evans, in Johnny Carisi's carefully organized use of dissonance, even in Bud Powell's harrowingly personal reassessments of triadic harmony. There was even evidence of the future in Stan Kenton's increasingly self-righteous, self-conscious and somewhat desperate midwifing of it, in his attempts to compress in time events that, like nature, would just have to take their course. But Charlie Parker, who had warned his disciples to keep open minds about the musical world around them, was already there, in some of his more eccentrically designed harmonic and rhythmic excursions, in his exploration of more distantly and ingeniously related harmonic cycles. He was there in solos like one on My Old Flame which he recorded live in a club in 1948, in which he appears ready and willing to break sonic barriers, to be chomping at a musical bit that, had he lived longer, he would likely have broken. His ability to serve, even as he conspired in his own self destruction, as such a broad source of inspiration (all of the above-named futurists idolized him) and enough to insure his statues [stature?] as a musical prophet and predict his eventual martyrdom, and he was one musical Messiah who not only walked, musically speaking, on water for his disciples, but who warned them, with great prescience, not to close their eyes to the increasingly complicated musical world in which they lived. (p. 259): Though I might argue that one treatment for what ails those of us who observe, fight about, and write about jazz might be detailed study of its complicated history, I don't really believe this will help. Everyone has their own uses for history, and mine, if more inclusive than the average, are no more objective nor less combative. My hope in writing all this is (that is, these last three hundred or so pages) is only that the occasional name will catch the occasional eye of the occasional reader, and deliver one more musician, dead or alive, from the humiliations of obscurity.

Face of the Bass - I would say the majority of jazz musicians, black and white, have risen from the middle class; even many of the early black players were from the African American middle class; there were exceptions, course, But it has long been an educated and relatively prosperous group that has produced these musicians. to me the freshest way to look at jazz history is through the music itself; once again I will recommend my own work, Devilin Tune, which has no particular racial axe to grin.

freelancer - there's a bunch of my music, with entire cuts, posted at: www.allenlowe.com

you need to read That Devilin Tune - the only truly multi-racial look at jazz, if I must say so myself -

right Chuck, but the essay has a point, purpose, direction. Not necessarily an indication of insecurity. I actually think, as well, that there are points I make it in the essay - about fetishization and mystification, and the contradictions inherent in both protesting such and then expressing such - are points I have never seen anyone make before. So maybe it will open up some needed discussion. It also is a way of my clarifying the purpose of my current musical project; I think jazz critics frequently use "influence" as an intellectual crutch. I was trying to show that "mediation" is a subtle but different concept.

also, Alan Eager had lost a lot. Unless I'm thinking of a different recording.

actually, me neither. Thinking about it is not the same thing as feeling insecure. Just a matter of recognizing the factors.

that's not a problem; that's how I figure out stuff. Writing is a process of discovery.

I saw her a few weeks ago in Boston - and she is incredible - the last of the line, IMHO - to oversimplify, imagine a combo of Dinah Washington, Kay Starr, and Lil Green - go see her if you can.

one of the more interesting ways of looking at these things is Alan Lomax's study of language and movement and the way in which it is culturally bound. John Szwed has written very memorably about this.

thanks guys - Paps, I'll need a little time to respond, woke up with a major-sized headache this morning - Noj - as for African American accomplishments athletically and in terms of movement/dance - I would argue less for genetics than culture - a culture (which can likely be traced to Africa) in which there is less self consciousness about physical movement, less fear of responding in a public way to music and sound (think of the old call and response, and the significant difference between white and black audiences in how they interact with performers; listen to old "live" gospel recordings). I think that this ability to express one's self through the body carries over, as well, to athletics. And it starts early; I have seen some very amusing things of white and black pre-schoolers in which these different responses to music are already clear and obvious. But once again I think this can be traced to a culture in which such means of expression are more regularly and less self-consciously expressed. And of course there are musical consequences to this as well; listen to white bands from, say, before 1930. Though of course this is all assimilable by white people; though some assimilations take longer than others.

mmmmm......cheescake.............

just joking around, David - personally I prefer looking at those babes -maybe I'll add a little cheesecake to the thread

agreed - though I'm sorry this isn't as fascinating to members of the forum as The Girls of Singlesnet.

Re: Mailer, I don't disagree that he was pointing at certain forms of liberation that were observable; it was, as I indicated, the way in which he transformed this perception into a stereotypical view of African Americans as sexually and pyschologically uninhibited that distrubs. The way he did it amounts, to my way of thinking, to another depiction of the "noble savage."

this will probably be in the liner notes to my next CD project: (the title of the essay may change) The Caucasian Storms, or: Seeing Memory I was re-reading Norman Mailer's The White Negro recently, and then a few essays in the Greg Tate-edited Collection Everything but the Burden. Tate's book is a very interesting collection of pieces on what whites have absorbed and taken (stolen?) from black culture. In a way weirdly complimentary to many of the ideas in the Tate book, Mailer's seminal essay posits the white hipster as a cross-racial personification of black existential being. White hipsterism, in Mailers essential description, represents a white way of adapting to black mores, and is driven by, among other things, a desire to challenge white (suburban?) sexual and cultural denial. Beyond this Mailer theorizes that white hipsters are, in essence, challenging their own imprisonment in the white race, in the process going for a thrill ride on that mystical yet viscerally effecting roller coaster we might, after the French, call Negritude. I remember distinctly that I found Mailer's logic suspect even when I first read the essay in high school, at the suggestion of a classmate who thought Mailer's depiction of hipsterism was complimentary to we suburban white boys. After all, we were just starting to understand jazz, the blues, and other African American forms and take them to heart, both directly (through the recordings and the occasional concert in nearby New York City) and indirectly (through the emerging roots-consciousness of then-contemporary rock and roll ). Though I could not articulate it fully, even at that tender age (16) and in that year (1970) I thought Mailer was full of it, that his particular theory of white shadowing of black form was a misguided and even racist (particularly by way of its sexual stereotyping) recognition of what was an important fact: that African American culture is American culture, and part of a birthright for which one need not necessarily qualify buy virtue of race but for cause: with respect, recognition, and even, to some extent, reparations of a social and intellectual nature. I was thinking back on this recently in light of various controversies that have raged of late in the jazz world, prompted by some of trumpeter Nicholas Payton's proclamations and then the guitarist Jacque Lesure's pithy little verbal essay on YouTube. Lesure tells us in this that, for whites, learning jazz is like him attempting Mariachi music; it can be learned by rote, but never really felt (and thus played) in a fundamentally authentic way, due to cultural limitations, a lack of initiation into "the life" (my phrase, not his, but clearly his meaning) and the kind of intellectual self-deception that leads we white folks to repeat, like a sad and desperate mantra, that it's all American music and it's all one music, part of the broader spectrum of good and bad art (as in that by-now old and tired saw, "there are only two kinds of music…."). Aside from Lesure's general problem of self deception (if he is talking about cultural limitations, well, than, the most culturally specific music I hear these days is hip hop, for which he and almost all African American jazz musicians are as culturally disadvantaged and under-qualified as I and my fellow white musicians), I feel he is dead wrong in most respects, especially as regards jazz and the cultural furies. The truth, as it has been for some time, is that jazz today operates on a cultural plane that is far different than that which it occupied in some of its older days. By now it is a cultural common denominator much more than it is a folk form, and has been so for a very long time (and of course I am far from the first person to say so). But the deeper truth is that Lesure and Payton are wrong for reasons that have a more complicated intellectual and emotional scope. Certainly American culture, with its constant tension of African American innovation and technical development succeeded by white response, has informed my work as much as it has informed his. But there is a lot more to it than that. Because as with some of the attitudes expressed in that book edited by Greg Tate, there are inherent contradictions embodied by various direct and peripheral forms of what is, by any other name, just a new form of Afro-Centricism. One of the prevailing theories regarding white love of African American culture is related to the alleged Caucasian glorification, eroticization, and exotification of all things black, an essential fetishization of what might have been called, years ago (and see above) Negritude. I have seen these allegations made in a thousand essays on the relationship of white and black culture and cultural practices. And there is a certain logic to this point of view, especially as reflected in traditional white racial ambivalence: a fascination with, yet fear of, black bodies, as expressed, among other ways, through the lineage of politically and socially-motivated atrocities committed against African Americans: think, just for starters, of slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow, and myriad other forms of domestic terrorism. Not to mention the condescending arc of Euro-critical images (particular during the jazz age) of the inherent, born-to-dance grace of early African American stage performers. And yet…there are problems with this basic theory. The first is one of basic inner logic: while I have read more than one cultural critique by black writers of such white fetishization of black essences, the literature of African American cultural writing is filled which just such forms of mystification, with African American literary attempts to downgrade white efforts at American cultural expression by reason of physical, cultural, and racial distance. The same forms of eroticization, and exotification which have been vilified as attitudes of degradation when in the hands of whites, are useful clubs with which to beat white people over the head, to re-enforce certain cultural boundaries and distances (remember that Richard Prior routine in which, as a parody of Sixties political expression, he read a poem in which the only word was "Black" repeated over and over again with increasing intensity? ). Certainly there is a deep sense of cultural mystery (and mystique) in all of this white recognition (going back at least 300 years) of black accomplishment, a constant feeling of wonder, expressed by whites, at certain paradoxically and indigenously brilliant African retentions. There is an understanding inherent in such critical response of the genius of the musical and language systems devised by African Americans in the New World. There is a recognition, as well, of the constant invention and reinvention of new forms in this essentially (but not solely) musically modernist, African American system of expression. But white recognition and high praise for such is not necessarily the same thing as fetishization and eroticization of the intellectual object. Certainly the whites whom I know and respect and who either admire or write about or perform these art forms (or who do any combination thereof) are aware that creativity is as much a matter of instinct as direct consciousness. But conflating emotion and intellect is far different than confusing mystical gobbledygook with the concrete and core intellectual requirements of creation and performance. And truth be told, a lot of African American writing, in trying to create a poetic dimension to fill that same gap between thought and creation, dances the dance of racial exclusivity. Argue for this if you will; but then, don't complain about whites who see this as an exotic, deeply spiritual, and therefore mystical cultural leap. Certainly Mailer was, of course, also, guilty, of such mystification. In a way he was ahead of his time: right for the wrong reasons? Or wrong for the right reasons? The real truth is that I have known thousands of great musicians, black and white – and that NONE fit the cultural conditions set by so many black AND white writers. Not a one of them is or was, by any stretch of the imagination, a hipster (though most were "hip" by any standard) – they were serious, studios, deeply intellectual men and women, for whom jazz and its performance was as much an intellectual as emotional exercise. Which is not to say that they had little or no understanding of the weighty racial and cultural issues involved. I had, for example, a few long talks with the black bassist Jamil Nasser, who worked with and had a deep personal attachment to the great white bebop pianist Al Haig, in which Jamil said he felt that Haig had very profoundly committed himself to what has been called by others 'the jazz life,' a way of life which, to Jamil's way of thinking, came at no little personal expense. To him Haig had, indeed, paid the kind of dues, both life and otherwise, that jazz required. Jamil felt that Haig could have taken certain kinds of cultural and financial advantage of his whiteness, but that he had neither the temperament or desire to do so (and of course, Bud Powell, the epitome of great African American jazz pianism, called Haig "a perfect pianist"). Take a roll call of all of the musicians I've known especially well, from Haig to Barry Harris, Joe Albany, Bob Neloms, Tommy Potter, Bill Triglia, Jaki Byard, Curley Russell, Dick Katz, Dickey Meyers, Dave Schildkraut. All were truly working musicians, and each had his own deep knowledge and understanding of jazz. I won't tell you which were black and which were white, though of course it would not be difficult to find out who was what. But Dizzy Gillespie (certainly the hippest of the hip and essentially a teacher, as each told me, to both Haig and Katz) said to me that the greatest alto saxophonist he heard after Charlie Parker was Schildkraut – and Schildkraut was a white Jew who told me he'd flown in alien space ships and who became, in his last years, more and more Orthodox in his studious application of his native Judaism. And it was the African American Jaki Byard who told me one night, in a confiding if near-off handed manner that was meant to mask the deep seriousness of his remark, that the reason the trumpeter Don Ellis was not more widely recognized by the jazz press was "because he was white." I was a very impressionable 22 or 23 at the time, and it took me some time to truly understand the complexity of Jaki's belief in this particular fact. But he meant exactly what he said, and he said it in the way he said it because he was not only deeply pained by his friend's lack of acceptance, but because he knew that acknowledging the reason for such went very much against the grain of certain and very basic social and political tenets. Ironically or not, I write all of the above on the same day that an article in the New York Times, on the neurological importance of reading fiction, tells us that "the brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life." Might the same apply to the learning of music by listening to it on records as so many of we white (and, truth be told, black) folks did, at least initially? And if so, what does this tell us about certain claims of racial exclusivity? Because if the brain converts things on the written page from observation to experience, what does listening to thousands of hours of music, particularly that made by long-dead (and usually African American) musicians in the years before World War II, do? On a personal level this has made me wonder about the potential skewing of various cultural theories of both micro and macro determination, from the big-picture questions of "realness" and authenticity of Zora Neale Hurston, to the more localized and indigenous habits of language and inflection as described by Alan Lomax. Is simply listening another form of socialization and acculturation, a means of psychological accumulation that is intellectually, emotionally, and anthropologically correct? In all of this, by the way, I was reminded of some of the criticisms that have been leveled against the white blues advocates who promoted and essentially instigated the 1960s blues revival. I've gotten to know a few of these people, who have been subjected to these same general charges, of over-romanticizing the African American music and musicians that they helped to bring into the mainstream by, as the allegation goes, pushing artificial, racialist, romantic ideas of historicity and authenticity. Nonsense, because once again this ignores the real and less sensational reasons they admired and advocated for this music: as with my own emerging love of jazz as a teenager, the real truth is less interesting: they did not like the music because they thought it was authentic – they thought it was authentic because they liked it. A common (and very) human response. Also, I would say, a crucial and major distinction, and one which points in the opposite direction of racialized, condescending praise. All of the above is written as a way of approaching my new musical project, in which once more I flail against the growing depths of my own anonymity (because for what other reason would I have to keep writing and recording music?). In the early stages of this (essentially American Song) project and in its rationales, I toyed, as I often do, with the racial questions invariably raised by the sources of the music I find most interesting – jazz, gospel music, ragtime, 1920s and 1930s pop standards, the blues, black and white hillbilly song, and what I will call, for want of a better term, Minstrel Pop (early song forms characterized, in some cases, by certain ideas of vernacular lyrics as crossed with minstrel conventions and by relatively simple folk-derived harmonic schemes, with diatonic or even near-modal melodies). I also toyed for some time – and am still toying – with a theme related to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel for which I was especially enthused after reading the actual text and then the praises heaped upon it by black intellectuals like W.E.B. Dubois. Imagine my liberal surprise when some of the African American musicians I contacted to perform on the recording were, shall we say, less than enthused by the idea of participating in something named for this servile-by-image token of American literary history. I quickly found out that my original project title, Visions of Uncle Tom (which I did indeed intend with multiple cultural and racial and political associations and ironies) was fraught with sociological and political dangers. I though at the time that it was a good title (and still do, along with the original subtitles which were: "in the time of Abolitionist Minstrels or: The Condescension of the Abolitionists." The latter was taken from the novelist and poet Paul Beatty's cynical take on the ways in which whites have always told blacks how and what they should be feeling from a personal and sociological viewpoint). So, though I did not reject the title outright (and am still internally debating ways in which I might make use of it) I found myself re-thinking, not the project itself (the music has progressed in a steady stream of composition since last summer) but the basic way in which it will be presented. I soon realized several things. Unlike with, say, Julius Hemphill, who wrote a piece for the dancer Bill T. Jones called Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin, my options were potentially limited in racially defined ways – obviously, it is much different for a white guy to throw the name Uncle Tom around than it is for an African American. No big surprise there, as with other forms of either negative or what is perceived as negative terminology. As I contemplated how to proceed, and started gathering a large cast of musicians to record the music, several important things occurred to me. 1) For white people, racism is like original sin; no, it's not LIKE original sin, it IS original sin. Just as the theological concept of same says that you are born with the sin of the ancients, so are all white people brought into the world with the history of American racism as something to be borne, not so much as burden but as reality, as a constant that involves privilege, actions, assumptions and language. Is this a truly post-racial society? Not now and not, I am convinced, in my lifetime (I am 58 years old). Whites still regularly do and say things which carry the assumption of privilege and superiority, and I am making no exceptions here. It is something a lot of people struggle with, but the key world is struggle. Things have gotten a lot better, but in a truly post-racial world, there would be no NEED to struggle. 2) One of the reasons (or really a prime motivation) for the rise of various Black Arts Movements of the last 50 years or so is a sense that African Americans have spent too much time allowing themselves to be defined by whites, and in white terms. This has happened socially (concepts of looks and beauty, for example) and behaviorally (part of the mystification of black culture, from the 1600s on, is related to white wonderment at the apparent lack of expressive inhibition in the practices of black music, dance and language), the freedom therein being constantly measured against certain Western (read: white) standards of sound, form, and decorum. But the key term here is Western – because much critical theory, or at the least critical response to black art, is couched in terms that are inevitably related to the background of the writer who, in probably the majority of cases (though thankfully this has changed significantly over the years) has been white. So although one might argue that we don't really need to pick between Western and Non-Western theory (an area in which, anyway, I am way out my depth) and that the important thing is simply strong and educated critical standards, the result is the same: self-determination, as a cultural response to either poor or non-comprehension, has animated the creation of African American improvised music for many years, from the AACM to the St. Louis collectives to the Loft Movement of the 1970s to the mushrooming of independent labels in the 1970s and 1980s. The best (and even many lesser) white critics have come to understand and adapt to this, to realize that they need a deeper and broader intellectual range in order to properly deal with the full scope of the music, both black and white, of the post-modernist 20th and 21st century (though certainly, and this is related to where I am going with all of this, some African American performers of a more nationalist bent might argue that just as someone on trial is entitled to a jury of his peers, the African American artist requires an African American critic to accurately understand the sources of his or her art. Though I don't think this is really a prevalent or dominant opinion). So basically one important and relevant problem is and was a frustration, on the part of African American artists in all forms, at having their lives mediated through the experiences of white people. And I certain agree that, while this is a hugely complicated subject, it is also a legitimate concern, born out by the millions and millions of words of poorly composed criticism that have poured out of various on and off-line publications through the years (and though I would argue that under-qualification is not exclusively a racial problem, I do recall reading some of the older record reviews in Downbeat, from the 1950s in particular, and cringing at certain almost bizarrely self-righteous white critics who seemed regularly to be saying in essence, in response to new music:"why didn't these guys ask me first? I know where the future of jazz is and how to get there!") And yet, this form of mediation, of lives as seen through the eyes of others, contains more than the germ of something potentially more interesting, of a possible basis for something, maybe, a little bit new. So I got to thinking, one day – well, if this (black life as mediated through white experience) has been prevalent, to the point of being racially oppressive and of provoking hostility, is there a way I turn the concept around and use it in a more creative and constructive (and personal) way? And then I realized, that, in my life, at least, such a thing has already been going on for many years. While I can honestly say that I have never fetishized blackness in the sense in which the term has commonly been used, I have, from the age of 14, at the very least, idolized hundreds, maybe thousands of black musicians – but not for their blackness, or by reason of racial or sexual envy, or even from a sense of white-suburban alienation, as the theorists of fetishization might posit. I admired them for the most innocent of reasons, for the ideas they expressed, the sounds they were able to produce through physical performance and composition. I mean, give me break. Bird wasn't a junkie stud to me when I was 14 and just beginning to listening to him, Sonny Rollins was no stereotypical, omniscient, all-powerful black man, Bud Powell was, and always has been for me, much, much more than a symbol of racial torment, Monk was no carnival freak, and Louis Armstrong was anything but a shell/minstrel man. These people were to me (as with many others I would meet and listen to over the years) simply the great artists of our time, the people I admired and then, as I got into music more deeply, analyzed. But there was something else I suddenly realized, and which speaks ironically to some of the things I have felt the need to worry about with my new project and its Uncle Tom implications – if black musicians fretted at having their lives seen through white eyes, as having their ways mediated through white experience, what was there to say for the prime cultural influences on my own life? Who were James Reese Europe? Lester Young? Son House? Ellington? Rollins? Parker? Jelly Roll Morton? Dickey Wells? Rosetta Tharpe? Sister Mamie Forehand? Arizona Dranes? Jimi Hendrix? Bessie Johnson? Bud Powell? Lil Green? Anthony Braxton? Mamie Smith? Sonny Clay? Utah Smith? Julius Hemphill? Ironically or not, these were black men and women through whom my life was mediated, great artists who not only changed my entire outlook but governed a great deal of my personal actions and attitudes, who effected my work, altered my whole personal orientation, and who refocused my entire life in ways that were not only personally demanding but technically and intellectually unforgiving. All of which attracted, no, consumed me, not, once more, by reason of their so-called "blackness" but by way of the things they were able to create, by their monumental personal achievements. Which was, however and of course, paradoxically, as we so well know, closely and maybe irretrievable related to their blackness, depending on how we define the term (and if this were an internet post, here I would place one of those little smiley symbols). What, I thought, if I tried organizing a musical project in which I reversed the charges? What if I tried to show how my life has and would and will look as seen through the mediation of African American musicians and other African American cultural figures (with maybe a stray white person dropped here and there, as long as it was thematically consistent)? The result is what you may soon hear, compositions that are essentially my own re-working of other texts, in the best (I hope) Brechtian sense. They are re-creations, but not like those kind you see on cheap documentaries. They are more like new paintings done over the originals, not tributes, and not merely references, but attempts to re-do things in my own image, to manage my own life as it has emerged in the shadow of American music. (Though of course I retain the right to detach my personal self from the results as necessary, to create myself, to paraphrase Rimbaud, as the other, to define a new persona for myself that might be called, after the trends of certain kinds of literature, from Handke to Robbe Grillet to Beckett, "the impersonal I." But that is another matter). So herein we see all that is me, through minstrelsy's complicated contradictions; through the "corruption" (all of my own doing) of ragtime; through the unpredictable flow of Sun Ra, the stop-start melodicism of Anthony Braxton, the dark/light harmony of Duke Ellington, the melodic density of Charlie Parker, the folk sophistication of Blind Boone, the constantly resolving and then re-built tensions in the music of Bud Powell; the determined if somewhat indeterminate modernism of Paul Whiteman (who, not-so-incidentally, employed and paid well the African Americans William Grant Still and Don Redman and who, anyway, had a great and lasting orchestra); through Varese (who encountered Charlie Parker in Greenwich Village in Bird's last days and whose composition Ionisation debuted the same night as works of William Russell, who was the man who re-discovered Bunk Johnson), Bix and Trumbauer (who both followed and effected the great black jazz players of their day), the cultural night vision of Ma Rainey and her travelling shows, the showbiz soul/subtlety of Joe Jordan, the tents and circuses of early black music, the flailing delta blues of Son House and Charley Patton, the hillbilly songs of the great white/black Diaspora of the South, through Jelly Roll Morton as filtered through Julius Hemphill's conscious extension of certain Southwestern harmonic and melodic traditions; by way of the great black minstrel Ernest Hogan, through the ides of storefront gospel as heard through the shrill moans of Bessie Johnson and Arizona Dranes – and then a few odds and ends of less determinate (if sometimes paler) origin, the gently zig zagging songs of Arthur Russell, Yoko Ono's accidental artistry, Iggy and the Stooges' post-blue and neo-punk, pseudo-artsy narcissism, Paul Goodman's delicately oppositional poetry, and, of course, my hoodoo gal, Zora Neal Hurston. Of course, even this detailed description is an oversimplification, because the band assembled to perform all this is neither black nor white but, like the ultimate objects of my musical admiration, mixed. Because my own work, beyond the accomplishments of my forebears, is as a result of the work of living and contemporary musicians through whom, as I write new music, my life is directed. So the mediation of myself through others continues in this way – with Randy Sandke, old friend and brilliant trumpeter whose musical mind moves in directions I can only wonder at; Darius Jones, who plays things I wish I could play myself; Matthew Shipp, whose intensity of thought and performance is a constant in my own development of new materials; Steven Bernstein, hyper aware of music and its possibilities in ways I can only begin to tap; Ursula Oppens, whose world of post-classical halls is so much different than mine as to force me to stretch myself in ways to which I am entirely unaccustomed; Jon-Erik Kelso, extraordinary bearer of a tradition that I hear regularly in my head but which, by myself, I can barely reproduce; Lewis Porter, literal transcriber of certain traditions at the same time that his own way is to keep moving forward; Noah Preminger, who knows, to re-work a phrase originating in another medium entirely, that the song is the thing; Ras Moshe, who has a knack for reliving the intensities of a previous era without ever abandoning the future. One of the names I used to call my old band was Hubert's Museum, after a freak show that Lenny Bruce famously described his mother as taking him to, in Times Square, when he was a young boy. I think my idea was to express the feeling that American song has, though its relatively brief history, re-defined the idea of high art in increasingly freakish ways – with expressions of deep and profound "amateurism" (vocationalism?), primitive wails, oddball sounds, powerful dissonances masquerading as their opposite, and sometimes very consonant and straightforward melodic and harmonic designs, all as appended to forms both complex and alarmingly simple. I hope in saying this that I am not reaffirming some of the very same notions of exoticism that I just denied possessing. Because for me these things are "freakish" only in the middle class sense, in their relation to the xenophobic scheme of American attitudes. What I like about even the strangest and most intense of American musics is their workaday inscrutability, the unassuming directness and lack of self consciousness of even the most intense yelpings and hard-scrabble (and even soft-scrabble) sounds. (And one thing I dislike about so much contemporary music of all spectrums, from roots-folk groups like the Chocolate Drops to the occasional punk-jazz band to the post-folkie folkies, is the absolute blandness of so much performance and recording. Isolation and multi-tracking have deadened the deep harmonic overtones of so much music we hear, and certain digital techniques of producing sound have smoothed out the wrinkles of the classic sound wave to the point of boring consistency. The whole drone movement has turned into a post-Fahey nightmare of new age consistency, world music has become the self-captive of smaller and smaller musical worlds and a thorough misunderstanding of the uses of modality and repetition; hip hop should be the future, but it has little real edge left and has used itself up with alarming speed; the folkies and new rootsers like even Neko Case have just flattened everything out, from old-time accents and vowels to instrumental inflection; and even "live" performance in general has turned into a strangely consistent form of amateur night, though not in the good sense referenced above). To me the overriding standard by which I measure music (my own and others) is that of newness, novelty, edge, technical control, organization, and surprise. Certainly, through the ages, the sources that have met this standard for me have consistently, but not solely, been African American. There is/was also: Elvis, Roy Head, Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, John Lennon, Al Haig, Paul Bley, Dave Schildkraut, Gil Evans, Roswell Rudd, Frank Hutchisen, Ray Suhy, Loren Schoenberg, Bill Triglia, the Band, Harmonica Frank, Ruby Smith, Randy Sandke, Janis Joplin, The Hampton Grease Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and others whose names only (I hope) temporarily escape me. I don't envy anyone their skin color, though I do recognize the cultural advantages that some have over others in the understanding of certain forms and ideas. I wish, for example, that I had half the intellectual depth of critics like Richard Gilman, Eric Bentley, Stanley Kaufman, and Larry Kart, but I have only a certain level of failed intellectualism to show for the many years I have spent pouring over various (non-musical) texts. I try to keep up with everything I can keep up with, but even as I write these words I sense how out of touch I am with so much of the world, for better and, yes, for much worse. The sense of permanent outsider, which started when I was in my teens (and which certainly may have been one reason for my finding so much unusual music attractive) was, and remains, more result than cause. Contrary to the way things may appear, I say and act in certain ways because these ways appear – to me - to be necessary and correct, though I am also quite capable of (at least what feels like) indefinite sublimation. But ultimately I have made no real effort at failure. It just, as far as I can determine, comes naturally, as the price to be paid for certain attitudes and habits and modes of behavior. And so it is with my admiration and dedication to certain kinds of music and the musicians which produce it: it is as natural and necessary as breathing, and has nothing to do with cultural or sexual or social or philosophical, or any other kind of envy. Of that, if little else, I am certain. - Allen Lowe

I talked to Paul last Fall and he said he was well - his hip has healed perfectly, as he told me.

if you can find it, the French Black and White double LP has great sound.

on MIngus' Blues and Roots, there one cut where the pianist plays the same phrase over and over in a "pre-minimalist" way, I would say; when I was a kid and first heard this on LP I always thought the record was skipping and used to try to advance it (was it Horace Parlan?).

for more on this, see the song Huh/Sublime and Funky love, on Blues and the Empirical Truth. his phrase was quite inspiring -

Miles hasn't played a note in years.

I've been listening to the Mode Records CD which is recorded later. I like this stuff a lot - one of the things I find interesting is that, as opposed to most other "serious" composers who attempted to adapt African American and jazz rhythms and rhythms of "the Americas", Russell actually knew how to do it in an engaging way. Most of that crew - from Cowell to Copland, etc - always sounds like they're slumming when they try to add "jazz" elements.

years ago I had a cat who peed on a Cannonball Adderly LP. And it was one of the good ones (a Riverside).

it's fascinating music - and apparently it debuted at the same concert as Varese's Ionization.