AllenLowe

I, too, often want to know the socio-cultural context - but, my reasons may be different than, say, an academic's reason - to me this is part of an aesthetic inquiry, because there HAVE been many times that I did not "get" a musician in an aesthetic sense until I knew more about why they did what they did - Bobby Short and Mabel Mercer are two examples. as for the rest, part of my annoyance has to do with this big blues project I just finished, and which I believe clearly out-distances anything Payton or his gang have done in this realm. And maybe (no, definitely) it helped that I came at it from a distance, as a white suburban Jewish intellectual (former) kid. Because it made me really look at everything, really try to understand things from a technical standpoint, from a musical standpoint, from every standpoint. Freshened things up, perhaps. my next project, Visions of Uncle Tom, is going to have everything from Jumping Jim Crow to the Old regular Baptists to the screaming of Yoko Ono. Maybe I can get Payton to guest on it. Worth a try.

get that Pujol guy to help you - he's got lotsa tapes in his basement. Might be one of those.

thank you for saying that.

your last paragraph is right on the money - those guys, as I said earlier, are now too "inside" to do edgy work anymore - their blues is middle class, a bourgeouisie (spelling?) exhibition. The Dwork is, as usual, wrong. These are lifelong issues always worthy of discussion,argument, and re-argument. And Noj's point is also exactly correct; as my old friend Richard Gilman pointed out, art creates its own counter history. It has its own life and reason for being, OUTSIDE of the social. as for Leeway desperately hoping that there's "not a chance" that uncool is the new cool, the exception proves the rule here, negative equals positive. His very act of denial proves I'm right; only if he agreed with me would I be wrong.

I love the sound of good '50s recordings with real room sound and just a nice group around a few microphones into a nice machine like an Ampex, no noise reduction. Those Chess things (and even the early things Sam Phillips did of Wolf) just sound so 'natural,' whatever that means. The best discovery I made in recent years was that my living room has a sound not unlike whatever they were using at Chess. A little resonance but not too bright.

uncool is the new cool - trust me.

is it compressed or rolled off? Did they use compressors in the '50s?

glib but untrue.

yeah and I hate the joint. but all seriousness aside, it's about alienation and the kind of of tension that makes a work of art an argument, a point of contention, And these days guys like me have a lot more to argue about than Wynton or Payton.

well, I could explain it to you guys - but then I'd have to kill you.

anyone who's interested might want to check out a very long Facebook thread I started - I had an epiphany the other night - if we White guys are the outsiders than, in this modern age, we are the true jazzers, since it's essentially an outsider music. So Wynton, Payton and crew are really no longer jazz musicians, since they are too far INSIDE, seriously.

dress optional?

if I get any more relaxed I'll become catatonic. I still think this whole thing was offensive.

aside from the bad singing, bad lyrics, and annoying music, the CD's fine.

I take it all back - Nicholas Payton is right! only someone whose mind has been colonized and held hostage by white men - no, occupied by Aliens - could have made a CD this bad - http://www.amazon.com/Bitches-Nicholas-Payton/dp/B005VKJ4DI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323642248&sr=8-1

has someone hacked Larry's account? He's might feisty today. Either that or I'll never hire him as a baby sitter again. And no wonder my wife looks so happy today. Though she did mumble something in her sleep about Harry Potter.... though I do agree with him about his Wynton article.

once again agreed, in the basics; though I find nothing blackface about the ODJB and in truth we just don't know enough about the actual music between 1900-1917 in N.O. to really grasp the lineage; even as we make the assumption that this is black music in those years, the co-development of white players was intense and complicated. But we can agree or disagree on this; what bothers me is Payton's willful ignorance that these are even questions that need to be asked, and questions to which we have no definitive answers.

from my listening, there were few tenors really playing even eights in that era, other than Prez - I also think of an interesting tenor named Bobby Jones (not the later, Mingus Bobby Jones) who recorded with Red Nichols in the late '30s or early '40s.

listening back I tend to agree that it's not Chu - though if you've heard the small-band stuff with Wingy Manone, you'll see it's not that far off. As for the pre-bop stuff, there's a fair amount on Old Organ Blues, also, even more so, on the double time in the tenor on Hearse Man Blues .50 and afterward - - what made me think it was Chu at first was the way, on the Manone stuff in particular, in which he varies his tone - sometimes heavy vibrato, and then a bit of lightness. In this way he was moving away from Hawkins' dotted eighth and sixteenth feel. but this guy definitely has some pre-bop chops. Check out Hearse Man Blues. also, not having seen Harry Potter's dick, I can't really answer Larry.

amen to that - it's weird reading his stuff because I can't quite get a handle on how serious he is - and I'd like to ask him a few things about the ODJB - if they stole their stuff from black musicians, where's the black band that sounds anything like they do? (well, Sweatman at times, but in a way that tells me the Sweatman band took from ODJB, not the other way around, since they sound nothing like this until AFTER the ODJB records) -

the Fremeaux 2 cd box is terrific, great sound.

where's Larry Kart when I need him?

well, in college I knew a guy named Tom Sawyer - I mentioned this in conversation to Don Byron once and he said, "what was his roommate's name, Ni**er Jim?"

Hawk is the king - I wanted to name my son Coleman, but the wife wouldn't have it. To this day I regret giving in.

hmmmm.....I understand in principle - but in my experience the local mentoring jazz players had a lot more talent than someone like Dunlop - thinking of a place like New Haven, where I lived for 20 years, and which had a lot of players who were somewhat "second tier", but often just guys who's stayed around - and even where, perhaps, they weren't fully functional as jazz players, it often had to do not with talent but a lack of time. Whereas. at least on this evidence, Dunlop is not really good enough to teach anyone. I will allow, however, that maybe he was a lot better years ago. But the playing they refer to now is just empty. Check out Marty Napoleon, for one good example - about the same age,plays at old age homes - but you can hear the feeling and the knowledge. With Dunlop, for example, on the internet version he does of 'Round Midnight - harmonically it's weirdly thin. He doesn't even sound like a talented amateur. sigh....