AllenLowe

there's a nice '40s Donald Lambert thing like this too - cannot think of the title - there's also Liberace Plays Charley Patton, but it's out of print, unfortunately.

Maine has lots of insect life - that's why I carry one of these (as long as those damned Democrats don't ban them) -

the missing 27 seconds: "Benny is dead....Benny is dead....Benny is dead.....and 5,000 sidemen are happy about it."

going back and reading David Ayers original stuff, which I missed before, I am truly shocked and dismayed - first of all, all of the great pianist I've known personally or met, from Barry Harris to Tommy Flanagan, Al Haig, Bill Evans, Hank Jones, Bob Neloms, Lennie Tristano, Duke Jordan etc could play all the keyboard with any hand - any reduction of style was by CHOICE - but who cares? The inventiveness (harmonic and linear) of a great bebop pianist is BEYOND any classical musician in the world - just ask Ursula Oppens, one of the greats in the classic/new music fieid, who said to me once "I cannot improvise."

some of my favorite Fletcher - guest appearance by Buddy Bolden.

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Tardo can play - though the last time I saw him was like 1987, with Jamil Nasser - he had a very nice Hank Jones-ish touch.

Zappa was a terrific composer who, to me, illustrates what's wrong with the Academy. Listen to the things on The Yellow Shark. His stuff employs a lot of "contemporary" musical rhetoric, but with a sense of life and experience, as opposed to most academic composers (or, for that matter, most current-day composers working in the avant-classical idiom; or even someone like Lamont Young, who is, to me, a prisoner of theory). Also, having heard the original Mothers (June 1968 at Columbia University), I have to mention what an amazing group that was. Zappa was a real musical auteur, shaping everything about that unit while still allowing their own individual realities to come through. And what other contemporary rocker (or, really, any musician from any age) could have done as he did that night, playing through intense passages of composed music one minute and then, the next, bringing Sam The Sham onstage to do a letter-perfect version of Wooly Bully?

as long as he got time off for good behavior...

I'm with Chuck on this one -

just to thrown in an irrelevant note, I believe that Nesmith's mother invented White Out. Also, as I recall, Nesmith was one of the first to do videos for song releases (though I always thought his own music was mediocre). The real champs in this were, I believe, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, if I remember correctly, who wrote a lot of those very good songs.

"crazy as a loon....."

wrong Allen Lowe - I'm a 19 year old gopher for Steve Hoffman -

I like Hyena noises - especially those mating calls.

I figure it's only emails. I can read 'em or delete 'em. No big deal.

not yet -

that's more like it - I'll send you my 900 number -

they never hear of Lovano? That's very weird -

wrong Allen Lowe - I'm a Freshman girl at Goucher College, majoring in the History of Hygiene -

Chris - you should be on Facebook, there's a lot of good stuff there- plus I recently started thread about you and your blog -

sorry, you got the wrong guy - this Allen Lowe is a 25 year old Stewardess on Air Trans -

I disagree - nobody required Beckett to explain Beckett, or Joyce to explain Joyce. Cecil Taylor has no such obligation, On the other hand, there are tons of interviews with Braxton, et al. You just have to look for it,

bi-sexuals, cross-dressers, and lesbians of the Harlem Renaissance (or really the whole 20s and 30s period of black entertainment): Ethel Waters Zora Neale Hurston Gladys Bentley Alberta Hunter and we can throw in Bessie Smith and more than a few others - if that's your idea of a good time - and I am not kidding about this one - the sexual liberation of African American women in this period is amazing and fascinating - a time of personal and artistic liberation as well. Great music as well. Perfect for an independent film project -

well, as Walter Benjamin maintained, there is no such thing as an audience - given that the meaning of the term is so complicated as to really be meaningless - who is the audience? It's different for everyone, for every genre and every niche - there is no single and identifiable entity. still, some (if not most) of us crave SOME audience, if only to be liberated from that which we hate (various day-job anchors) into a situation of freedom to do what we love to do. But personally, though I believe the music I perform is quite accessible, it would not exist without those who took many more chances than I take, who pushed things along in ways which were, given the times and the "audiences," much riskier - and that fringe which gets so critcized - from Albert Ayler to Cecil Taylor - freed all of us, from beboppers to new music-ites, to do what we want to do without being slave to certain formal and generic assumptions. So we owe them an enormous debt.