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AllenLowe
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Posts posted by AllenLowe
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I liked and respected Martin Williams, but he could be a complete a-hole. Bad fingering? WTF did Martin know about playing the horn? Nothing. Dick Katz, who did a lot with Williams, told me his biggest flaw was his inability to admit he knew nothing technically about music. I began wondering about this myself when I read Williams describing the tune Woody 'n You as being "in a minor key." Wrong; it was in D flat major (and I hate when critics pull this crap; Gary Giddins described I'll Keep Loving You as being based on You Are Too Beautiful changes; complete nonsense).
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that may be only the second Dexter Gordon solo I have ever liked (in his work after 1960). He's actually awake.
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very sad to hear this, I recorded with Ken in April and he was magnificent. I love the guy and I hope all of this resolves itself.
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if she is having true mental health problems (and it sounds like she is, whatever the cause) she needs to find a doctor/shrink who will write her out of work, who will put enough restrictions on what she is allowed to do to permit her to go on disability (I am assuming she has some kind of coverage). I did claims work for many years, and she certainly sounds like she qualifies. It doesn't have to be permanent, but I urge you to look into this asap, before the situation gets out of control.
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all excellent.
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you gotta have Elmo Hope.
And I would subtract Weston; I find his Africana speeches annoying.
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17 hours ago, Rabshakeh said:
It feels like more ‘forward thinking’ jazz and improvisation has entered a strange space, where critical praise is linked more to the critics’ trying to keep up with the in crowd than with views on the music. Not that critics ever didn’t do this, but I don’t recall criticism and reviews all seeming quite so rote as it does at present.
The truth is that I really enjoyed your playing on that East Axis record. I thought that the freshness of your ideas on the album stood out in a scene that has become increasingly samey.
Really awful to read this. And sending you best wishes.
Thank you, and I do have a tendency to distrust my work when it comes a little too easily. And by the way thanks everyone for the good wishes. Things are not quite so desperate as they seemed on the day I posted that, though there is still a great deal of ambiguity to my health. I see my surgeon on Friday. He’s a genius, and the only guy who could figure out what the hell to do with me (I essentially suffered from radiation burn, which left me vulnerable to brain infection. I’m safe for the time being, but there are still some nasty possibilities; so the cancer didn’t get me but the side effects of treatment might).
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I am not posting this topic as a hit-and-run… I am currently out of the country, returning Thursday and face a series of surgeries for which the prognosis is now clouded. I mentioned this not for pity, but to explain why my responses here may be a little delayed from time to time.
Here’s what I’m trying to say: I get discouraged by the Jazz world, and it’s frequent overpraising of musicians who improvise in open settings. Case in point: I got the best reviews of my life for my playing last year in a free Quartet with Matt Shipp, Kevin Ray and Gerald Cleaver. It’s always nice to have good reviews, but I have recorded better music at least 10 times in my life without much critical response. The truth is, and few musicians will admit this, that improvising without boundaries or restrictions It’s easy. I repeat, it’s easy. I’ve been doing it well since I was 15 years old and first really understood what Ornette was up to. I certainly didn’t do it as well as him, I still don’t, but neither do thousands of other wannabes. I have a very specific philosophy of free improvisation, I think I can do it more interestingly than most horn players, but it does not compare philosophically or conceptually to the thousands of hours I’ve spent in the last 40 years composing and designing maps for improvisation, many of which combine free playing with chordal playing. One was off the cuff, fun to do but basically here and gone; the other was planned and artistically determined, a matter of artistic conscience and design.
I know there are many really really good musicians who improvise freely and make a career at it. And that historically, from Albert Ayler to Eric Dolphy to Sonny Simmons to Prince Lasha, there has been monumental work done in this grey area of form and content. But the truth is that the concept has run its course, lost its original energy and intellectual vitality. It has become like a cult of musical personality. It is destructive to jazz and destructive to critical standards. That’s just the way I feel, and I repeat again, I’m damn good at free improvisation, and probably better than most. But at this stage of my life it just doesn’t mean that much to me anymore.
I say this as one who had shared stages and recording studios with Julius Hemphill, David Murray, Hamiet Bluiett, Kalaparusha and Roswell Rudd, Matt Shipp and Don Byron. With the exception of Murray and Byron, I love all those guys and feel pride in the work I’ve done with them. And two of them, Julius and Roswell, were monumental musical personalities and god-like in their spirituality and invention. But they are gone, and I feel like I’m living in some kind of a musical shadow world, artistically disembodied, looking at myself from some clouded distance.
I post this here and not on Facebook because it feels like there’s a little more privacy in the shade of these forums. A lot of things are weighing heavily on me right now, and I’m not really sure how long I can continue the pace I have set for myself. I am tired and discouraged, my chops are weak, my jaw is shredded from radiation, and there are days I feel like I’m getting nowhere fast. I’ve just practically killed myself recording what I hope is not some kind of last testament, 6 discs of personal revelations released from a private hell. Still the music means so much to me, and may be the very last thing between my selves and personal surrender.
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59 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:
I am the opposite. For me, I prefer Graettinger, Rugolo, and Richards. Holman and Russo charts tend to be plodding and tedious IMO.
The CD version of City of Glass is poorly sequenced.
interesting; I think Holman is over-rate but I like Russo. Graettinger, however, I love.
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aside from Yoko, who I have mixed feelings about (if I have to hear her again, screaming along with Lennon on some old clips, I may need to react in some non-rational way), the vast majority of musicians I have known came from average backgrounds of no particular privilege. As for Fluxus, I need to do more homework, but my general sense of modernist movements like it is that they made their point, which was potentially radically altering, and then should have moved on into using those ideas in expanding ways. Instead they, like much free jazz that I hear today, got caught up in repetition and cliche.
My biggest complaint about Yoyo is that she convinced Lennon he was a genius, in the most self conscious way, and from then on it was all down hill for his work. It's like with Dylan and Lou Reed: convince someone that they are a genius and they conclude that anything they produce is a work of genius. The result is largely mediocre work and worse. Lennon became an artiste, and it was a disaster.
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21 hours ago, ghost of miles said:
I can’t vouch for Appel’s veracity or lack thereof, but I’ve read several accounts of NYC-area teens attending performances at Birdland in the 1950s. However, my understanding (again, based on what I’ve read—Dan Morgenstern, were he here on the board, could surely clarify) is that teens were required to sit in the so-called “bleachers,” an area next to the stage. Appel’s account has him seated at a table, and a good one, too, next to a table ostensibly reserved for a celebrity guest—so that does sound unlikely. But I don’t think the story can be disqualified solely on Appel’s age at the time of the alleged encounter. Might be a good question to put to Mike Fitzgerald’s jazz research listserv… thinking that there would surely be other accounts of Stravinsky dropping by Birdland one night to hear Parker play, if such a thing did occur.
It's not just a matter of him being 17 years old, but, as you implied, the lack of access that would lead to his sitting next to Stravinsky. It's just a silly story, implausible, just too "good" to be real; reminds me of Al Rose's fabricated conversations, in which the subjects say exactly what we want to hear them say. As to Appel's veracity, see Larry Kart's comments, above. I mean, if you want strange historical juxtapositions, I'll tell you about my meeting with Jean Genet at Slug's circa 1969/1970. I was only 15 or 16, but we never had any philosophical exchange (though he did say to me "son, you will have a great future; and by the way, Sartre says hello." Actually, all he did was nod).
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47 minutes ago, JSngry said:
"those kind of sounds"....what does that mean exactly?
Those later Miles bands were expertly constructed, actually. Arcs, textural developments, rhythmic finesse and colors, you name it, they knew exactly what they were doing and although Miles probably didn't give them the specifics, you can bet - and the players will speak to it to this day - he was guiding the whole thing.
well, I don't want to get into a protracted back and forth, but to my ears it's mostly electronic textures and sonic layering; I hear the whole as being less than the sum of its parts. But I find that electronics create their own atmosphere, and I've put together some musical collages with wave forms, and it was shockingly easy to sound deep and complex.
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there are some interesting moments in those Miles years, but truthfully I felt a lot of the music was lazily constructed. It's really quite easy to assemble those kind of sounds.
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1 hour ago, ghost of miles said:
I checked my copy after reading the Open Culture post, and it appears Appel is referring to himself.
I highly doubt Appel witnessed any such thing. He was 21 when Bird died, so this makes him likely too young to have witnessed Stravinsky watching Bird; this is rumored to have happened in 1951, when Appel would have been 17.
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As is frequently mentioned, he gave a riveting performance of Who Do You Love (Bo Diddley tune) in the film The Last Waltz.
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1 hour ago, gvopedz said:
I was hoping the Mosaic box set would have the Lena Horne songs. It was on Black & White that she recorded the spirituals “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”. Lena Horne recorded very few spirituals.
But then a Mosaic box set of only Lena Horne would be even better.
that is indeed a good performance; I think it's on my blues set.
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5 hours ago, jazzbo said:
The Lena Horne session is not included, as is mentioned in the "Producer's Notes."
that's unfortunate; her singing in those relatively early days was much better, to my ears, than her later work, which was extremely mannered.
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it sounds good on the samples, though I probably won't buy it. Wondering if it includes the Lena Horne session? Also, gotta tell Mosaic; in their blurb listing all the important pianists on the set they fail to include the great Arnold Ross. Also, the Jack McVea sample has a terrific trumpet solo by somebody name Joe Kelly, which they don't even mention in their online notes. Who was that guy?
This could be him: https://en.everybodywiki.com/Joe_Kelly_(musician)
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20 hours ago, Rabshakeh said:
This thing sounds like it's present in the pre-RCAs too, though. It's what we all love about Rollins.
The RCAs don't seem as playful to my ears, although there's obviously humour in many tunes. But they do have something that the earlier records don't have, which is the supposedly "Coltraneish" aspect that isn't actually very Coltraneish. I don't really know what it is though.
Do you think Rollins experienced a deepening of understanding of aspects of music at this point that wasn't there before?
It really is not a Coltrane-ish thing to my ears, but I would suggest that Coltrane's way of stacking chords forced Sonny to take the bebop method to it's most logical conclusion, which is that every chord suggests a lot of other chords; what he did, to my ears, was connect these chords in dense and brilliantly varied (rhythmically complex) clusters. It's like this circle of harmony. Maybe it can be generally explained, but pulling it off is a whole other thing; it's like one continuous, Joycean sentence that circles itself and then extends to another level of consciousness, before seeming to level off, at which point (since the chord has changed) it recycles itself in new harmonic/scalular directions (some of which veer off harmonically, but which almost always resolve consonantly). As for Sonny understanding new aspects of music, well....I think this period is a very logical extension of his best 1950s work; it is as though he has just filled in the spaces (to get a sense of where he was in the '50s check out the recording he made with MJQ in the late 1950s; the one with Doxy, You Are Too Beautiful, I'll Follow My Secret Heart, Limehouse Blues. This is where he is starting, to my ears, to really fully extend the bop gesture).
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1) I am glad that Jim cited The Bridge as sub-par Sonny; I find the album strangely dull.
2) I was lucky enough to come across the RCA LP of Sonny playing standards when I was maybe 15 or 16 and it was revelatory. This really was the greatest era of Sonny's playing, no if, ands, or buts. I was able to pick up a few more RCA Lps of this era as the years passed. As Mark said, his chord-change playing was unbelievable, an incredibly dense exploration of tonality and harmony (as a tenor player I have tried in vain to emulate this, though it seems to have to do with a king of circular line, parallel scales and figures that move across the harmonic landscape). Happily I now own the Complete Sonny Rollins RCA on CD (or something similarly titled).
3) Jamil Nasser expressed the belief to me that Sonny was completely thrown for a loop when Coltrane became the dominant tenor. In Jamil's opinion this was why he cultivated a somewhat self-conscious eccentricity, playing on the bridge, getting the Mohawk.
4) Sonny, for all his gentle persona, is fiercely competitive. As much as he loved Hawk, according to what Paul Bley told me he was always trying to throw Hawkins off, to play so abstractly that the older man would not know where they were in the tune. Hawk asked Bley, on more than one occasion but particularly on the recording, to signal him in for his choruses.
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I have tried; with some interesting exceptions it just all sounds too calculated. It verges on the adventurous, but then loses its nerve.
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I recently pissed off Darcy James Argue because I mentioned that I do not like Carla Bley's band writing. It strikes me as strangely conventional, the harmonic voicings, the execution; fake daring. As opposed to, say, Duke, George Russel and Gil Evans and Julius Hemphill, whose big group work always seems to be on the edge of a certain kind of musical disintegration. Her work has its moments of disjointed glee, but they are usually fully under control, with very little true harmonic tension or emotional release. It's like a giant tease resolved by consonance and convention. Is there not anyone else who feels this way? Her whole thing is too controlled, lacking in non-textbook essence. There is, to quote a great lady, no there there. There are sections I like, but they come across as second-rate Brechtian/Weil gestures with settled triads and land-locked chords.
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On 5/6/2022 at 2:42 AM, Gheorghe said:
Would like to read something about it. Since I was audience only. Usually the shows started with "For Harry Carney" and it was a fantastic contrast between the quiet parts and a growing tension, each soloist playing duets with Danny, and Mingus´ solo was up into the highest register of the bass, really very impressive....
there's nothing really to read except that I was told by some fellow band member that he was continually showing up late, missing planes, playing the prima donna. His sudden "fame" went to his head.
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11 hours ago, Gheorghe said:
I don´t know how he acted then. With Mingus I don´t think he had time or possiblility to act like a primadonna. He was very articulate then, and they did all those great tunes live (Cumbia, Three or Four Shades of the Blues, Noddin Ya Head Blues, For Harry Carney ) , which sounded much better than the overproduced Atlantic Studio recordings. Jack Walrath and Ricky Ford, and on piano first in 1976 Danny Mixon (Viena and Switzerland "Willisau") and Bob Neloms 1977 (Italy). Ricky and Jack had the role of that call-response on "Cumbia" while on the studio it was also oboe and bassoon and trombone. So Ricky and Jack had to carry all the load but did a great job on that. And on that rap passage (Mama´s lil baby don´t like no shortnin´ bread....) all those honks on tenor. He was really strong, and I think he was very very young then, in his early twenties.
The first time I heard him in 1976 first I was a bit disappointed that it was no more George Adams, that´s how it started....
But as for Mingus sideman it´s interesting I have albums of Adams-Pullen, but don´t have individual albums of Walrath, Ricky, Neloms or so.
it was with both Mingus and Danny Richmond. I have first hand accounts.
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Posted · Edited by AllenLowe
I just tried to post a nasty comment, but for some reason it did not work. Do we have an email for this schmuck?
Actually here he is on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gordon.skene
I just send him a firm FB message, and also posted a complaint on his time line.