AllenLowe

some of the early shows are brilliant, but the series lost me as it went on to being meaner and more self-referential - but I gotta admit the real reason I have trouble watching is that I grew up with the guy and every time I see him it reminds me of how much more money he has than I have - of course, I live a spiritually rich life that more than makes up for it -

get anything by Sonny Criss - and that's an order - did you hear me? What are you waiting for?

I like Thornton's - perfect production by Johnny Otis, great Pete Lewis guitar - I find Elvis' version a little too novelty-like. well, as that old Jewish character says in The Sunshine Boys: "I did black when nobody else was doing black - and when I did black you could understand the words."

that's an interesting one.

I have no problem with white people playing the blues, only issues with execution - I actually prefer Clapton's singing to his playing, which I find rhythmically stiff, even on the old Cream recordings which I find just don't stand up that well guitar-wise (though they wrote some great songs) - and I think Beck and Page were good Yardbirds replacements, more imaginative and exciting as guitarists.

I like the original rock-based blues, and I think it does go together with the others you've mentioned - as a matter of fact, I would make the argument tha the rock-blues movement gave new life to the old-line blues, not just commercially but musically; the kick that it gave the old bands really forced them to look at their music freshly and to change some of the old formulas. And though yes, you can say that various kinds of soul are Southern and so bi-racial in influence, when you start to look at a lot of that influence it's very one-sided. There's a fascinating book by Bruce Pierson called Black Legacy which points out how the raising of white children by slaves changed the whole way the South spoke and acted, as these kids picked up the mannerisms and vocal inflections of their surrogate parents. Likely this had a broad cultural influence, from singing to playing.

very sorry about his death; that whole school of playing, from Fahey on, I find to be well-meant but lacking in intensity, a little too-reliant on open tuning and the more obvious things it allows. but this guy was too young to go. Sounds like a sincere guy.

I actually find Jagger (and I do not like the Stones) to be one of the more minstrel-like white blues guys, self-consciously so (or double-consciously so, to paraphrase Du Bois). I never understood why they were so highly praised - except as songwriters, which is where their talent lies, in my opinion. Otherwise I find Watts to be uncompelling as a drummer (and his time is not that good), Jagger is just annoying after a while, and Richards, an intelligent and a compelling arranger (guitar-wise), is just not that interesting after a point. But Jagger is particularly silly, and though he tends to think that we're all in on his joke, I don't think he really understands how much of a poseur he is. Not that it matters to his audience. for blues in this school I would list a lot of others first: Ruby Smith (the rocker, not the Bessie Smith relative); Bloomfield, Butterfield, Peter Green, the Blues Project (Steve Kalb in particular), Blind Pig, very early and very late Janis Joplin, Big Brother, The Pretty Things, etc etc just my opinion, as the saying goes...

here's one of the best things written on the subject, by Tony Russell, in a review of a CD of old time medicine show and minstrel music: "Throughout the 1960s and well into the 70s, one of the most popular British TV shows, equally successful on the London stage, was a song-and-dance extravaganza by performers in Edwardian boating costumes. The women wore frilly dresses and big hats, the men striped blazers, straw boaters, white trousers – and black faces. To be precise, blacked-up faces. The cast was entirely white.The Black & White Minstrel Show was the last manifestation of a genre of entertainment stretching back, through radio acts of the 1930s like the Kentucky Minstrels and Alexander & Mose, music hall figures such as GH Elliott, ‘The Chocolate-Coloured Coon’, and GH Chirgwin, ‘The White-Eyed Kaffir’, to the American minstrel troupes that filled British stages in the late 19th century, dispensing the ‘plantation melodies’ and ‘quaint humour’ of the ante-bellum black South – or at least a version that would pass as plausible with an audience who knew no more of Alabama than of Atlantis. As a form of popular entertainment, minstrelsy was too deeply embedded in the American consciousness to be silenced. In the United States, where the genre originated, a production like The Black & White Minstrel Show would, by the 1960s, have been inconceivable. Changing fashions in show business, and changing attitudes about the portrayal of race, combined to exclude the blackface minstrel show and its descendants from the Broadway stage and network TV, and few were sorry to see them go. But as a form of popular entertainment, minstrelsy was too deeply embedded in the American consciousness to be silenced, particularly in the South, where its stereotypes of shiftlessness, credulity and hedonism still had the power to fix the African-American in the amber of caricature. Off the beaten tracks of national theatre circuits, the blackface minstrel survived, and one of the places he survived longest was the medicine show. A unique compound of therapy and theatre, the travelling medicine show offered small-town Southerners the excitement of unfamiliar performers bringing them new songs, dances and comedy routines, for the price of listening to a quack doctor’s spiel about Hamlin’s Wizard Oil or Kickapoo Indian Tonic. From the late nineteenth century through much of the twentieth, the medicine show was an academy of vernacular music. Black and white musicians alike served their apprenticeship in show business on the medicine show stage: Memphis bluesmen such as Gus Cannon and Jim Jackson, the Texan T-Bone Walker, architect of modern blues guitar but in his youth a dancer in the Black Draught troupe, and hillbilly musicians from ‘blue yodeller’ Jimmie Rodgers, to Texas bandleader Bob Wills and movie cowboy Gene Autry. A fuller list of graduates of this rustic finishing school would include Harry Houdini, Buster Keaton and WC Fields. Nothing is more likely to vanish from the historical record than a fleeting visit to Hicksville by a nostrum-peddling ‘Doc’ and his hired players. The medicine show, however, was still a significant part of Southern musical culture when the American record industry began to take an interest in that culture. Numerous medicine show stalwarts became recording artists, and in doing so preserved repertoire, much of it inherited directly from the nineteenth century minstrel folio, that sharply evokes this otherwise lost world of rural entertainment. A fascinating collection of those recordings, Good For What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows, 1926-1937, recently appeared on the Old Hat label. Scrupulously even-handed, the 2-CD set contains 24 recordings each by African-American and white artists, from nonsense songs like ‘It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’’ and ‘I Heard The Voice Of A Porkchop’, to the double entendres of ‘Adam & Eve In The Garden’ (‘... surely must have shook that thing’).As the detailed notes explain, some shows were composed of white performers and some of black, but not a few were mixed, with artists of both races making up in blackface: a theatrical convention that must have created curious resonances, not only among audiences, uncertain exactly what they were being shown, but possibly also within the cast, no less ambivalent about what, or whom, they were portraying. For some white musicians, the experience of working alongside African-Americans, especially if in the guise of one of them, could offer a means of participating, up to a point, in black culture, of gaining what later writers like the Beats would envision as a spiritual hotline to negritude. Such an imaginative identification would be crucial to the process, in which many white musicians engaged, of becoming a white blues singer. The white bluesman (it almost always was -man rather than -woman) might take that career path out of admiration for black music and a desire to approximate it. He might merely have identified a musical form he could execute and ideas he could exploit. Whatever his motives, he needed to display some understanding of the culture he was appropriating, if he was to carry any authority with audiences who were as familiar with the original as with the replica. Coming, as he probably did, from a poor white background, he already knew something about African-Americans from sheer contiguity, but performing among them in a medicine show exposed him to their instrumental and vocal techniques and, in particular, performance styles. Thus equipped, the white bluesman could go as far as he wished in emulating his model. Jimmie Rodgers, who worked in blackface on medicine shows, seemed to his contemporaries even to sit black. ‘His leg didn’t do like mine does’, said fellow white bluesman Cliff Carlisle. ‘He put one leg over the other, and it was hangin’ right down... He reminded me more of a colored person, or a negro... than anybody I ever saw.’ Loitering on the margins of the black experience, men like Rodgers, Wills and Bill Monroe were inspired to create new forms. Loitering on the margins of the black experience, men like Rodgers, Wills and Bill Monroe were inspired to create new forms – the blue yodel, western swing, bluegrass – that brought together black and white musical practices in an organic synthesis, legitimised by its creators’ empathy with African-American music. The next generation of white blues singers would not be able to share their predecessors’ experience, for by then the medicine show was in decline, but they could inherit and develop the idioms they had invented. One who did so, with momentous consequences for popular music, was Elvis Presley, who not only fused blues and country music in rock ‘n’ roll, but delivered it with a physical presentation rooted in African-American expressive style. Presley’s ‘That’s All Right Mama’ may seem to belong to a different world from a medicine show song like ‘The Cat’s Got The Measles, The Dog’s Got The Whooping Cough’. But medicine show veterans, watching Presley as well as listening to him, would have recognised that he was simply transferring their techniques to a larger stage."

it's really more complicated than all of this - and I think John L is basically correct; the first thing I would do is a bit more research on it, both musical and literary - because it's not quite enought to just say minstrelsy, because it means a lot more than you indicate - it is the first minstrel shows (antebellum); then the black minstrel shows (late 1800s) and than the traveling medicine and tent shows; and then the early traveling black shows from the early 20th century; and yes, sometimes it is extremely bad and sometimes it is more than that - the source of American pop, I would argue; but also a persistent reminder of American racism and attempts to quash African Americans in the wake of Reconstruction (see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness); sometimes it was meant respectfully, other times not. Sometimes it was a force for liberation, other times merely a racist anchor. And to label all white performers in such a way is way too glib and a huge oversimplification. Not to try to obscure things, but I just spent about a year on this very question, and it is neither A nor B. I would suggest reading Eric Lott, Strasbaugh (spelling? sorry); Berndt Ostendorf; Seroff and Abbott; Lawrence Levine (probably the single best source here); Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints; NOT Nick Tosches, who makes a lot of mistakes in his book on Emmett Miller; and I would listen to not just Emmett Miller, but Al Bernard, Arthur Collins and Lee Morse, even early Marion Harris, Gene Greene, and a few others from the first part of the 20th century. And from later on, Stovepipe, Peg Leg Howell, Julius Daniels, Pink Anderson, Gus Cannon etc. It also helps to be well versed (in a way that I am not) in African American humor and in performers like Pigmeat Markham, Moms Mabley, Dusty Fletcher, and Mantan Moreland. Because you can and do draw lines - Elvis Presely is not the same as a garden variety minstrel performer, he has a more complicated relationship to black music. Bruce Springsteen is not the same as Peggy Lee, though both use certain African-American influenced vocal inflections; Dave Schildkraut is not the same as Benny Wallace, though both are heavily influenced by African American ideas of sound and rhythm. So there are lines everywhere, between minstrelsy and early blues (which was a genrational change in musical approach, a transition from old to new schools), between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy and Miles, James P.,Fats Waller, and Jaki Byard......also, of course, there's Billy Lee Riley, Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield (who are quite different than, say, Frank Hutchison, Dick Justice, or Doc Boggs) - culture is social and environmental and not genetic, of course, and this is American music, so everyone has the right to partake. But it's far from uniform in quality and understanding, or in the way it treats its cultural antecedents. Racism is a constant in American life, and the domestic terrorism that particularly pervaded the South from reconstruction into the 1960s and that made a target of African Americans (and even white progressives, particularly in the post-Reconstruction era) complicates this subject in ways that defy very easy summary; you need to use a lot of caution because to just ask "why should we make the distintion?" is (in a way I know is unintended) very disrepectful to the experiences and difficulties of the lives of several generations of African Americans, who have spoken very clearly both on and around this subject. but you will find, now that we've broached it, that this is an exhausting subject.

as I mentioned before, I'm with Chuck on early Evans - the first album from '56, the stuff from around then with George Russell, East Coastin' with Mingus, and the live stuff with Tony Scott around 1959 - also that live at the Vanguard thing with Konitz and Marsh.

just as an aside, years ago I knew one of his bass players who described the difficulties of worked with Jamal - his name for the leader was "I'm Mad Jamal."

the rhythm section sounds great, but I find Jamal incoherent, all effect, no substance. There's a difference between mannerism and style, and to me he's all mannerism - and he's not even particularly good at what he's doing - aside from repeating himself ad-nauseam he loses his way, fluffs things, loses continuity - he's actually surprisingly sloppy at times; phrases just drop off, just stop, because he doesn't know what to do with them. Weird stuff.

anybody for real early Evans, 1956-59? I've always thought his initial Prestige recording was the most original/personal interpretation of Tristano around -

that's good; please post page 175-197, as well -

I think it's John LaPorta in his autobiography who talks about hearing Max Roach in a practice room at the Manhattan School of Music, playing, interestingly, very good classical piano -

in those last years he was a strange encounter - I knew his last wife pretty well, and most weekends when he came home to her he just spent the time in his room shooting up - the few times I ran into him he was generally friendly but distracted - except for one very interesting and very lucid conversation when he seemed remarkably straight and focused. But I had the feeling that this was becoming less and less common (and it's unfortunate because personally he was quite smart and analytical). there was an element, I think, of a classic family history of depression and suicide, as I recall - plus a streak of narcissism and chronic self-centered dissatisfaction (he used to complain to Nan that he was unrecognized and under-compensated, which I thought strange for someone as famous as himself, especially compared to most jazz musicians I knew). the woman from the Jazz Wax interview strikes me as massively naive and more than a wee bit dumb in her lack of understanding of what was going on between them, her sense that she was so special when the truth is he was so self-directed that anyone who wanted any kind of relationshipo with him had to serve primarily as an enabler in order to hold his attention. and Larry's right, it ain't just nice prose but an accurate characterization of his playing at this stage. Best I ever heard him was the same night we had that long conversation, playing a beautiful and relaxed version of Stars Fell on Alabama on the little Baldwin they had in their living room. Sounded like it was 1959 again -

that's Duvivier? I don't think we're talking about the same guy - I'm not referring to the guy to the left and somewhat in front of Jamal and next to Clayton -

allright - there's Jamal from some TV show - illustrious audience includes Jo Jones, Ben Webster, Hank Jones, Buck Clayton, maybe Harold Ashby, a guy who looks like Hentoff, maybe, and probably some other famous people - and Jamal plays one of the worst solos I've ever heard by a musician with a reputation - all kinds of good ideas (a la Nat Cole in particular) in a kind of round - that are meaningless in any kind of context. And it keeps going....and going....and going.... ....same nice phrases, over and over, on a musical bridge to nowhere. Weird guy -

The Yellow Shark - Zappa. To me his "serious" work has all the energy and edge (as in having some contact with life) that the academics largely miss.

re: Bunk Johnson, I love the Deccas - which are available through GHB, I believe.

fine pianist and arranger, married to Helen Merrill. I feel badly; though I barely know her, she is a nice lady and a great singer. tough year - as always -

thanks - will do -

that bothers me not the least - it is one thing if you copy another project, cut for cut - what they've done is cull stuff from a lot of different places - and those other places were borrowing it anyway - the Paramount Masters is MONUMENTAL - ought to be enshrined in the Smithsonian. they've also got boxes of other Paramount stuff, old time music, string bands - the mastering isn't as good as Yazoo, but this stuff will eventually disappear if we don't grab onto it now.

I think she's doing a great job in HHS - I can forgive a little youthful indiscretion -