AllenLowe

well, I ordered 2

Homeland Security mission?

let's get some oldies in here: Jimmy Blythe Jelly Roll Morton Fess Manetta Jimmy Yancey Robert Cooper Tony Jackson Luckey Roberts Clyde Hart Al Haig Zez Confrey Ferrante and Teicher Harry the Hipster Little Brother Montgomery Abba Labba

my god - I should order about 25 -

well, since it's on Willard Jenkins' blog, I would ignore it - ******* ******personal dislike. Please ignore post. Or see Cliff Englewood for commentary.

geez, I wonder why George got in trouble for My Sweet Lord - I mean, according to Danasgoodstuff, this whole clean-slate thing is stupid -

"a guy getting oral sex while driving at highway speeds" actually, Pendergrass was getting it from a transvestite when he crashed his car and paralyzed himself-

didn't realize my fan club would disrupt the proceedings - sorry Cindy, and all the best.

I said academic posturing, not posturing, a key difference - and I'm sorry, but Tucker's stuff is too damn typical of academic writing to be funny. I've read a lot of this stuff. Re the other, I am talking about the life of artists, and that can be described in many different ways, as bio or autobio; there is a difference in forms, but the ultimate aim is really the same.

I heard she went to work for OJC -

it's not that we don't want to hear the details of the life, even the social context - the problem is that academic works invariably put me to sleep with contextualization, and too often reveal a certain cultural impoverishment - see my Sherry Tucker reference above. The ignorance of her position is so at odds with any actual experience of the music as to make it laughable. I love reading about the life, about what happened, when it happened, how it happened, who it happened with - I just cannot stand the boxing of musicians into social categories, as both symbol and cipher. Read John Szwed's bio of Sun Ra if you want to see how it can be done correctly - or read Beneath The Underdog, Death of a Bebop Wife, Tonight at Noon, Clyde Berhardt's book, to name just a few extremely informative biographical works, which are all about the life but devoid of academic posturing.

for George, will you talk about his time in the Navy band (he was an ensign)?

well, my favorite thing was Barry Harris telling me about working with Hawk, and hearing him play All the Things You Are: "I began to think that maybe I had idealized Bird and Bud too much, because here was someone who lived and kept growing." there is no higher praise -

not far from the Robbe Grillet/Beckett ideal, as in: "he has nothing to say, only a way of saying it."

people should stick to just having sex in cars - don't forget Teddy Pendergrass -

bud powell bud powell bud powell bud powell bud powell bud powell

Coleman Hawkins is god - just my opinion.

unless you're selling her something - can I interest you in an annuity? Aluminum siding?

though I do have nice hopes for the Monk bio, Adorno's (and Larry's) complaint fits almost all academic work I have read in the last 10 years, sad to say (notable exceptions: John Szwed and Lewis Porter). I'm always interested in the life of the musician, and often it does help me see the music more clearly, but not in the way that academics seem to picture such things, as large and rationally observable social forces. let me quote from the notes to my upcoming blues set: Travelin' Light Billie Holiday 6/12/42 Travelin' white? One academic writer, and I kid you not, has used the evidence of Holiday's expressed pleasure at recording with the Whiteman band on this West Coast trip as evidence of her shame at her own blackness. It seems that Billie tried rehearsing, shortly after this session, with a black band that was more on the roughhouse side, and then informed its members that they suffered in comparison to Whiteman. Sherrie Tucker, in her book Swing Shift, seizes upon this incident as reflecting not just a lack of racial pride and/or awareness on Holiday's part, but also abject personal shame at her own skin color. This is a complete perversion of the truth, and ignores the reality of Holiday's own oft-expressed aesthetic ideas. She simply preferred the softer dynamics of certain musicians and groups, in the same way that she preferred the (white) pianist Jimmy Rowles over (the black pianist) Oscar Peterson. Not to mention that this near-blue ballad is a thing of beauty, and that beauty, to quote Ornette Coleman, is a rare thing. Damn the ideologues -

well, that's me PRIOR to haircut (and flea bath) -

actually, it makes you look a lot younger (I'm assuming, like me, you're about 85) - I think I'll try it myself -

keep it going, Cliff.

danasgoodstuff thinks: "...everybody's tying to Be My Baby" & "Honey Don't" (are) from Roy Newman, maybe "Matchbox" as well, all of then possibly 2nd or 3rd hand; that's the way real music works. Clean slate originality is an inanely Romantic notion," missing my point - and if that's the way "real music" works, well, than tell that to Charlies Mingus, who would have chased you from the room with a large knife. Because Perkins barely "adapted" those works, he stole them - give me a break. And it's especially offensive since there was little acknowledgment, at the time (and now, in your post) of the African American oral tradition from which things like Matchbox sprang (and it's silly to do a tracer with Ma Rainey, et al; Blind Lemon brought those lyrics into currency). And it's not like Perkins (whose music I love) was just hanging out on the back roads somewhere with black sharecroppers. Sure, he learned from black locals - but the inane point is that he heard those specific records and swiped those specific songs (you probably are not aware of the fact the B.L. Jefferson sold a lot of records; must be too romantic a notion that an African American could do so in the 1920s). To rationalize it by citing earlier borrowings misses the point. At least the Rolling Stones and Clapton make specific efforts to cite their influences (and in Clapton's case, make sure that people like Skip James got some royalties). This was big business by the 1950s, and Perkins knew what he was doing. and I write stuff all the time that is "clean slate" original; at least a lot cleaner than Matchbox and Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby. Lots of people do - I can send you a list - start with Monk, Ellington, Hemphill, Lennon, McCartney....

ok, you want dance...