AllenLowe

I wish.... it is a Buescher, I think the serial number places it at around 1920 (?). It's a great horn. These things tend to be stodgy with the original mouthpieces, but with a tenor mouthpiece I can get an Ayler-esque shriek.

I just like being thought of as a great mind.

it is to me.

by the way, the name of the new band is 7/4 everything we play is in that time signature.

well, many tired old forms have huge audiences - look at PBS on pledge night, fill with aging doo-woppers and their Depends-dependent audiences. So I'm not sure if that's the measure. It's not impossible to get something new out off the old. I've already cited Jaki Byard, but look also at Barry Harris, who, since I first met him (1977) always showed a deep sense of how bebop could be gently developed and taken in personal directions. Look at Lee Konitz, who has not essentially altered his style, but has deepened it. And others have done the same. So it's not impossible. "burping into an empty watering can" tried that already. Gotta move on to the next thing.

sure, as long as he's not one a them heavy drinkers. after all, Maine used to be a dry state.

"They just want to do something new to fit their contemporary context or experience the thrill of discovery/recovery." I agree, and maybe evolution is NOT the right word, as it seems to be judging the past by the present. And the reccovery or re-creation of old music is a tricky slope. Sometimes it is done brilliantly, with an authentic energy and sense of committment. As I've probably already indicated, I find this not to be the case with much of today's roots music, which seems second-hand and strained in its associations. But it's indeed another thing to hear a young fiddler who has listened and then put his/her own stamp on an old form. Which is why, as I may have also said, the guy I like today is Eric Royer of Boston. Amazing player, with a unique and un-feigned energy. after him, I'll still take Doc Walsh and Gus Cannon over the Chocolate Drips.

in my continuing efforts to make my life easier (as in not having to transpose music) I bought myself a nice old C melody that, lo and behold, was exactly as described by the ebay seller. Put some new pads on it, a tenor mouthpiece (which gives it some volume) and I love the thing - and it weighs a LOT less than my tenor, which is good for my aging hands. Also just got my altos fixed up, my '60s Buescher sounds like my old Conn (I thought such a thing was impossible) and I got my mouthpieces worked on by the great Greg Wier of Florida. Been writing new music like a maniac. Been rehearsing my band. So now I'm ready to go. Where's the gigs? I repeat: where's the gigs? you mean, I gotta go out and find them myself?

though I love Booker, I remember not liking this session. But I haven't listened to it for many many years.

1) what I'm talking about is historical events, the driving of those events and the alteration and development of politics. Very separate from, say, the musical development of jazz and blues in its arc and cause/effect - very much so because, though I agree that everything has a social context, I also believe it is not worth listening to unless it lives outside of history and independently. Most importantly, what Bev was referring to is really a political phenomenon (though yes, it ultimately impacts the arts) - 2) as for form and the need to change, I think that certain forms just wear out their welcome - bebop leads to repetition, as did swing, and basic orchestral triadic harmony and even chromatic harmony. Many musicians just get bored, feel they've tried the possibilities - same with early blues which, it has been argued, was a very personalized response to the minstrel-ethos (and here I mean minstrel in the broadest sense of the word to encompass various forms of early commercial gospel and basic professional songwriting) which had, in many ways, dated itself by subject and style. The new deep delta blues, in this way of seeing it, was a new expression that came of certain kinds of modernist necessity. There was just new things that had to be said, new subjects covered, people were thinking differently, imaginative imagery was changing. Hense, in these stages of blues, we find Robert Johnson and than T. Bone Walker, to give one evolutionary cycle. In jazz think King Oliver-Armstrong-Lester Young-Coleman Hawkins- Bird - Trane - Ornette (to vastly over simplify). Things change because certain musical gesture are just tired and outworn. Also happens in theater, as in dance, as in every form of expression. (Except, it seems, current day 'old time' music).

I actually think Bev is completely misreading all this as the "great man" theory, which is another thing entirely. That theory refers to socio-historical and political events. What we are talking about here is culture and the elasticity of forms, which always need to change by reason of personal or expressive imperative (as prior forms tend to wear out their welcome, tend to exhaust themselves). And which, in their details, tend to reside quite outside of history in its more coercive sense. More Robbe-Grillet (Toward a New Novel, a book that everyone should read as it applies to all forms across the board) than The Fall of the Roman Empire.

agreed - they, like Monk, provide their own frame of reference, own system, own world.

"a discovery really doesn't "mean" anything until it's defined - not in terms of language, but in terms of context to its time, place, people, all that good stuff." that's where I disagree strongly - new things that are so startling new and brilliant are so because they exist so suddenly, as part of their time yet completely apart from it - as an alternate to what we normally consider to be history. To define them in social terms is to reduce them to things that are finally just utilitarian, that only serve to put them into the kinds of context that, in the process, strip them of their life and essence. The reason these things still sound so good to us - from Robert Johnson to Bird to Varese - is that they stand so completely apart from representational ideas like people, place, etc. Which does not mean they have no context or time, but only that such things are secondary to their way of being.

he's an interesting guy. but alternately gregarious and then elusive, great to talk to - lots of insight. Would like to see the interview. (and the elusiveness is a longstanding trait - 2 musicians, separately - Julius Hemphill and Randy Sandke - told me, about 20 years apart, about how much they liked him but how frustrating it can be to deal with him. Last time I saw him was in Middletown, summer of 2008. He asked me if I wanted to record with him but I haven't seen or heard from him since. But if I do, 7/4, I'll put in a good word for you).

yes, I agree - the shivers come from discovery and recognition of discovery - whether it's Charlie Patton, Charley Parker, or Trane -

Cliff- did you actually interview Anthony? How did you get hold of him?

"I hold to the view that the hardliners have invented much of the past (not the quality of the music, just its near mythical unapproachability) and are now using that invention to besmirch the musicians of the present." I'm not sure, Bev, if you see me as a hardliner - because that runs quite counter to everything I believe in - I see the past as radically use-able - after Phillip Larkin who said, re-jazz, that everything in the music is really happening over and over again, at the same time - "the past refuses to be over." and even if the past HAS been invented, what's wrong with that? This is a music of imagination and myth, I think, of invention and re-invention. Wynton is a hardliner - I once said that he makes a club out of tradition in order to beat current heretics over the head. I don't believe that one needs to know about those old musics that I mentioned - HOWEVER - if one is to try and coin truths about that old time music, or to try to refer to it (as with the Choc. Drops), well than one has a responsibility to have experienced, in one way or another, that which is being referenced. They clearly have not, and I see their alleged historiosity as fraudulent. But that's just me. as for pimps and great music, let us not forget the most important pimp of all - Jelly Roll Morton.

merely making reference to the power of suggestion - my point being that there's nothing essentially wrong with having our basic assumptions questioned - I do it all the time (to myself). The key is to either accept or reject and than be secure in your decision. This is how I got from, say, Barry Harris to Julius Hemphill in my associations. I, too, was a middle-class sinner in my old life, a worshipper of the bebop idols. so, Bev, if I could do it, you can do it. and just to add, parenthetically, Hemphill is a perfect example of a musician who was able to take the vernacular and ingeniously rip it apart and re-assemble it to his own specs. Everything from the blues (which, as he told me, he found boring in its essence - as when he was playing backup to Ike and Tina Turner - but which he later realized held the key to major musical alterations) - to minstrelsy to various aspects of black showbiz. But he made something of it that was quite shatteringly new. This is where I find groups like the Chocolate Drops lacking. But short of new legislation, I cannot force you to look at it my way.

I saw his big band live in Munich, maybe 1994 - nice group.

drink the Kool-Aide. actually, DON'T drink the Kool-Aide.

"Tell me I shouldn't be listening to what my cultural background, experience, instincts, rambles have me listening to but should be listening to X, Y or Z and I'm likely to start snarling. " really? I've lived my whole life by the idea that my persional cultural exposure should be the exact opposite of what "my cultural background, experience, instincts, rambles have me listening to" - and I think you probably have, as well. Otherwise we would never leave the womb.

Carnegie Hall had its own built-in recording system, and it's possible that that was the source for these.

have you tried North Country Audio?

biggest problem is finding a mini-turntable to play them on.

well, if you insist: Frank Hutchison Molly O'Day Dick Justice Cliff Carlisle Kitty Wells Milt Brown Elvis. contemporary enough.