AllenLowe

well, Jim and Ted R. - it is the blues because technically it is the blues - but it is not the blues for the same reasons as, say, Tommy Johnson - and therein, I think, lies the difference - because Wynton would say that it IS for the same reasons as Tommy Johnson. But Louis had much more of a medicine show soul, I think. and Jim, let us not, as Dave Van Ronk used to say, be guilty of Crow Jim. I'm not lecturing any particular race here; but, if you want to get technical, the black musicians I used to play with (when I used to play) used to tell me that everybody they grew up with thought it was anything but the blues; their friends preferred black pop and they had no use for the blues ("that was that old time shit we got away from.") And the jazz guys I knew thought of the heavier country and rhythm and blues as merely dance music (though Barry Harris used to play Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby?) but, sorry, can't give anything else away for free, you guys are gonna have to shoplift the book - I will add one little point of historical interest - guess where the first documented used of instrumental/vocal call and response was (as in the classic blues vocal accompaniment)?

let me add something - I did not say that what he is playing is not the blues - it is the blues, WHEN he plays the blues - the Lincoln Center theory is that EVERYTHING he plays is the blues, whether it's the blues or Hello Dolly, because they are assuming that the blues informs everything that he does, that it is the center of his methodology and musical philosophy - I think this is just plain wrong.

jim, you're putting words in my mouth - also, first you say that no one can define a blues player or the blues - than you say Armstrong was a great blues player - the literalness is yours not mine, as well; I am saying that it's not either or - that the musical tradition from which Armstrong comes reflects a lot of different influences,not simply one stream called the blues; in his particular case the songster tradition is reflected by, first, the rise of the post-Civil war professional songwriter; and than the Gospel/minstrel composer (eg James Bland); and than the professional black minstrel shows of the 1890s; and than the medicine show; and than the black touring companies of the first 20 years of the 20th century. Add his love for opera; and than LISTEN to his whole method of performing. The vocal style is part jazz and part minstrel man, clearly, and far from the blues in sound or phrasing. He pulls the music AWAY from the blues, takes it toward a method of linear improvisation with a great continuity, a sense of forward motion that is MUCH DIFFERENT than the methods of the blues. And he turns it into something completely unique, synthesizes these many things. But in essence, in the deepest sense, he comes out of an African American tradition of song and improvisation, of word play and word manipulation which uses all of these things - song form AND the blues - to create a new stream of American music which is neither one or the other. In another sense, he represents a certain professionalization of the blues. Especially if you accept that the source of the blues are the field chants, repeated lines, coupling of verses and than rhymes, all of which originated with non-professional performers, though it was soon spread into places like the early minstrel shows. And this professionalization, I think, really uses the blues as just another song form- it uses it brilliantly, but not in the radically different way in which early African American proponents of the blues used the form. Bird, by the way, is an interesting case. Quite a blues player for the very reasons I have given elsewhere - no matter how linear he plays, he still maintains the basic modality of the blues (or vertica-ness, I would call it). So actually, he is the exception who proves the rule.

Tony Perkins - wondering what that one sounds like -

"So...you define the blues and thereby what is not the blues? Sorta sounds like Center Lincoln, but let me know how that works out for ya', ok?" no, Jim, 100 years of American music defines the blues - you just gotta listen to all of it - once again, a relativistic argument that defeats itself - if no one can make an attempt at definitions, why do we even get out of bed in the morning, no less post here? And when I attempt to define the blues I bring a whole helluva lot more knowledge of that body of music than some other parties - the difference is that I allow for nuance and contradictions - but you'll just have to read the book - and in the meantime I will start burning all the books I have on blues and jazz because they have the nerve to define those musics - sorry Larry, but it's gonna be a cold night here in Maine -

gotta admit I HATE jazz flute but have some tolerance for: James Newton Eric Dolphy James Moody Charlie Haines (obscure now; used to live in Connecticut) other than that I wish the intrument was banned. And contrary to prior comment I am not doing one of my things here -

missed Woodstock - my brother said "let's go" but than we heard traffic was backed up for miles and we decided too much hassle - I WAS at the Grateful Dead's first NYC Central Park concert in '67 - they were quite fantastic - not the same thing, I know -

Joe McPhee is a great guy - speaking of Jerry Rubin, I remember going to see him in Cambridge, maybe around that same time - he was making a lot of money with his new hip networking thing - someone in the crowd gave him a (justifiably) hard time about it, referred to the new "hip-ouisie" (not sure if that's the best way to spell it), an appropriate term for a new gneration of Yuppies who liked to use the phraseology and "style" of the hippie left to justify their own greed. Makes me think of terms like "lifestyle," and want to wretch -

well, I'll repeat my suggestion - a thread or a location where we can go to hear the stuff, maybe one band at a time - for example, my web site has quite a few listening samples - a link is all we need. But when there are 18 threads or 18 bands or 18 ideas of who to listen to, I tend to walk away as I just do not have time - maybe one person with technical skills could run the thread, posting a band's stuff every week - make it direct and simple, we can all listen, and THAN we can all trash it -

well, I played with Doc Cheatham when he was almost 90 - could still outplay everybody -

I hunger for new music, problem is acquiring it and/or listening to it - sometimes too much of an investment if it turns out to be lousy, as most new music is - maybe we could create a "listen to this" thread with access to listening posts of a selected group - than we can have a common frame of reference -

I'd be interested in hearig this stuff as long as it's not like the crummy freak-folk stuff I've been hearing or that other highly touted boring group - what's the name? has the word "sun" in it I think-

I remember that one - whothefuck sings whoosawhatsit -

I don't think so - I find his blues playing brilliant but not really as blues playing; lacks, to me, the off-hand roughness of that style; there is a heat to his playing, a deep brilliance, but I think it goes in a different direction. On the most basic level, he really introduced the major third and major seventh into use in jazz soloing in a way which took the music very much away from the gutbucket. I mention Lincoln Center because they - Marsalis, Albert Murray, Crouch - have made this blues view of Armstrong a real cornerstone of their jazz philosophy. When one listens to the great blues singers of the 1920s who came out of the minstrel/medicine show tradition - thinking, eg, of Julius Daniels and Simmie Dooley - one realizes that Armstrong has more in common with them in terms of basic vocal presentation than with, say, guys like Charlie Patton -

I tell you, it's been like that for over 20 years - Sonny's one of those guys who, as soom as he took over his own production (well, really Lucille) everything went down hill. Too much ego, in a strange and veiled way -

interesting timing on a number of accounts - first, another HURRAH for this material; hope they let Doug Pomeroy master it and hope they find all the good sources - there are a number of LPs and CDs that are very good of these, if you search hard enough, but everything has problems - as for Louis, I've reached my own conclusions lately and am trying to get a book thing together - the prime conclusion being that, contrary to a lot of the conventional wisdom (mostly emanating from Lincoln Center), he was NOT a good blues player, but used the blues as a formal entity equal to any other, as another platform for his own very complex creations which were really part recitative per the operas he loved, part comment on American pop song and the standard repertoire, and part remant of the minstrel world, or at least that part of the minstrel world which emerged after the 1890s; these came out of the new African American shows, beginning with the traveling minstrel shows, with circuses that used African American performers, with vaudeville and tent show offshoots, as well as things like the Smart Set (a travelling black show of the early part of the 20th century). Still working on all of this, however -

well, listening to a lot of jazz IS like pulling teeth -

well, with Sonny's current groups I always wanna subtract at least two - and maybe more -

a bat Mitzvah in Woodmere in 1954 - Irv Feldspar -

by the way, about that Antiques Roadshow - Dan Morgenstern saw it and said, basically, b.s, the stuff was worth a fraction of what they estimated, and they have the same stuff at Rutgers -

is that the same as Music Minus One?

try out the 1939 solos - If Dreams Come True is a masterpiece - so Chuck, you spent time with that weirdo and lived to tell about it?

Chuck - are the Cornell recordings the ones that Sunnenblick has? He once described them to me - hope he gets 'em out -

well, this new gas situation is leading to a lot of special promotions - the other day I went into my local station and there was no price posted; the guy said "if you can guess the price you can have sex for free." So I guessed and he said, "sorry," and I left. I was driving by the place a few days later with my wife - I said "those guys are offering sex if you can guess the right price, but I think the whole contest is fixed." "Oh no, I don't think so," she said. "I won three times last week."

"The CD features... Sonny Clark, Hank Mobley, Tadd Dameron" I thought those guys were dead -