AllenLowe

anybody out there know how to build a cross?

the ultra cheap prices are, unfortunately, gone - however, I will sell you any volume of this history of jazz for $45 shipped, 2 for $85, 3 for $122, all 4 for $160 - my paypal is: alowe5@maine.rr.com (those prices are for domestic shipping; email me if you're not a 100 percent red blooded American)

don't know much about piano rolls - however, the pianist Dick Zimmerman has done a lot of research on old blues-related sheet music, so I will have to contact him - yes, it's crazy how much those books cost, but they are quite revelatory - the other book that I find essential is Lawrence Levine, "Black Culture and Black Consciousness."

whoa, a lot has happened since I started this - these are big issues, hard to address (just starting to write the book, so I will face it soon) - however - as Jim asked: "Are we seriously entertaining the notion that white songwriters just all of a sudden started writing "blues" songs out of some random impulse & that black performers said, "hey, I like that, wish I'd thought of it!"? " actually, in another way, that's a real possibility - as Charles Keil, theorized once, it is quite possible that the first blues were the result of white attempts to codify and "organize" black sources. There were songs with the classic blues progression that were NOT blues (eg Frankie and Johnny) and it is indeed possible that a professional, white songwriter heard the kind of couplets that black country singers were singing, saw the harmonic possibilities, and combined the two - I actually doubt this, but it is not out of the realm of possibility. I will be consulting Peter Muir, who has looked into this exact thing. There were also black pros, and there was a very active form of song that Dick Spottswood has called "gospel songs written for the minstrel stage." Like "Oh Dem Golden Slippers" and "Poor Mourner." As for white prose, white showbiz types have long made it a point to check out what black musicians were doing and maybe "borrow" a few things - this was very common, for example, in the first 20 years of the century in NYC's ragtime/club scene. as for what may have been the initial blues form inspiration, the key is probably the couplet - as in, "goin down the road feelin bad/goin' down the road feelin' bad/goin' down the road feelin' bad/ and I ain''t gonna be treated this way" - that's an early one - but more on that later, as I've said - as for Seroff and Abbott's books, ESSENTIAL reading - and worth the money if you can manage it. as for the past and the present, they are all the same. I make no distinction. It is now, it is then. Proof of this is the result of certain kinds of brain stimulation during neurosurgery - events start to appear to whomever's brain is being stimulated and they appear with immediacy, as though they are happening in the present. So I don't just embrace the past I seek it out, acquire it, work it, welcome it, because I cannot get away from it. Things that happened 40 years ago are occuring as we speak; the sooner we realize this, the sooner we'll get some rest -

don't look now guys, but the same thing is about to happen here - apparently the good reviews on the last CD have gone to Alfredson's head and he's thinking of requesting DNA samples before anyone can post on Organissimo. Also, I have a source close to him who indicates that all future new members will have to donate canned foods to him and his family before they can register - also, as a hazing, new people will have to fedex him a hardboiled egg - and, not coincidentally, that's his daughter's favorite snack -

ahh, the whole thing sucks - I love ebay and have done a lot of stuff over there, but nothing makes any sense and the more they "fix" things, the harder it is to use. Not to mention how vertically integrated they are - fees on the sale, fees on paypal - which they own. Also, and try changing a reserve price - do they refund the fee you paid for the HIGHER amount? no -

the Fillmore LP came out when Miles was alive -

yes, too massive. I'm feeling compelled after a recent personal ecounter, let us say.

actually, he made up all that stuff -

I will try to look at blues as written by "professional" songwriters - people who did it as a vocation; as a matter of fact, Peter Muir's work deals with just that. The most intriguing (and unanswerable)question is which came first, the professional songwriter version of the blues or the country version. At various times in my life I would have said one or the other; now I'm really not sure. Of course in African American traditions the roles are sometimes merged and intertwined -

thanks, Hot Ptah, will be in touch with him -

well, it depends how one uses history - one can be Jaki Byard - or one can be _____(you fill in the blank) - but I do think the vertical-horizontal thing speaks directly to African American musical practices - and after all the blues is essentially a modal music in its origins and a vertical music in its original practices - and the thing about the old stuff is that sometimes, as the saying goes, it's so old it's new. Many painters discovered this (remember cave paintings? Radically fresh, undisturbed by certain assumptions). Picasso thought this (re-African paintings) - I find all this music actually quite liberating, the older the better. as for: "an ever-growing part of me wonders what would happen if we let the past be the past and instead of trying to own the present, just own nothing more than ourselves." well, we are never more ourselves than when we understand that we are ourselves past, present, and future - that the past, in my opinion, is always happening again and again. It repeats itself in dreams, memory, associations, language, et al. So it cannot be escaped, even when we think we are escaping it.

Downbeat January 22, 1931 Armstrong Shines: But What's Next? by Allen Lowe; New York City Satchmo's latest swings, but where does jazz go from here? Maybe Count Basie should take over the Bennie Moten band. Or Duke should hire some new guys (I heard some real swingers a few weeks ago in a Harlem jam session; memo to Duke: Look up this new guy Cootie Williams - not to mention little Johnny Hodges). But still, that begs the questions - what will they call the new music? What will it BE, and will it BOP?

yes, basically, has to do with the jazz players who generally (but not always) have the need for linear continuity in a melodic sense - however, my idea of the blues as vertical works great as a theory but there are too many exceptions to the rule - Bird. Bud. On the other hand Horace Silver has always struck me as a bebopper who had learned the lessons of the blues not in the sense simply of tonality (hence O.P., whose blues playing drives me crazy) but in terms of time and touch - and of course that percussiveness is related to Bud's as well. There is also in Silver's playing a sense of "stopping" in time to make certain kinds of melodic/rhythmic emphasis - which relates again to the idea of the vertical - I may stop worrying about the exceptions and have to recognize that there's always a different way to go. On the other hand, I do think that lack of attention to the vertical-ness of the blues is what makes so many jazz players unconvincing as blues players. And when they do try to recognize this they tend to resort to maddeningly-trite cliches (so-called 'blue' notes beaten nearly to death, repetition of certain phrases, etc etc) - Still figuring all of this out, but these are the things going through my head -

actually, I'm not sure if I am up to it, but I feel it just has to be done, given all the arguments that go on. On the other hand, given, maybe, three years, the mastering can be done. I think I have someone to issue it, but still working on confirmation (also, length of the project!) Might also be time to find a literary agent, though I've had next to zero luck with this in the past - biggest struggle will probably be the writing - so....I spent the weekend going through LPs and CDs and found a lot of what I need - sorry, Jim, I was referring to the old Max Roach argument, thought you remembered - somewhere I actually copied my position on vertical versus horizontal into a word doc, will try to locate - and, wonder of wonders, as I type this I am listening to a GREAT Dorothy Donegan blues performance from 1942, Every Day Blues - beautifully and TASTEFULLY done (I always remember Barry Harris saying to me about her, "weird broad...she has chops like Tatum but NO taste.")

well, her friends nicknamed her "Poison" -

true, but there's also Howard Odum's research in the field and some work by Dorothy Scarborough, even Lomax, though I have some reservations; also amazing documentation by Lafcadio Hearn on black Cincinnati in the 19th century. Also, I do think it's even possible, per some recent research by Peter Muir, that the showbiz blues preceded the country blues, that the more "pop" form emerged in a dominant way before even the blues that emerged in the country - and that the country players may have picked it up from the "commercial" players and not necessarily vice versa. Or maybe not. Also possible is that it was happening in obscure country locations and picked up by commercial composers. Richard Zimmerman has found some older sheet music with blues forms, as has Muir. In addition, there is testimony by Mance Lipscomb (born 1895) about when HE first heard the blues, so, anecdotally, we have some sense from these multiple sources. We also have, on record (via Paul Oliver) a very early witnessing of "the blues" in a minstrel/medicine show. Add to this older songs like Frankie and Johnny that are not really blues, but have the chord progression... also, re-preachers, there is an AMAZING amount of early (1920s) gospel that Document has issued, fantastic stuff, archaic and complicated, that I think is quite revealing of some of the things Chuck is talking about. All in all, it's an unclear picture, and truly the most important thing I feel I can do is present the known elements and make it clear that this is what I am doing, and nothing more (or less). As I've learned from Larry Gushee, if we don't KNOW something to be true, than we cannot/should not say it is true. My problem with some famous jazz musicians is that they don't bother to distinguish the known from the assumed. Aside from that I think there is a fantastic amount of music that can be juxtaposed in a way never done before. Dan - that old email doesn't work - you need to use alowe5@maine.rr.com, sorry -

what a voice! she musta been at least 200 years old -

well yes - but Seroff and Abbott have given us two massive and amazing books now in which they document incredible amounts of info from the old African American newspapers about the showbiz life of that time - and there are enough oral histories and other things floating around from veterans of that experience that we have a solid picture of who was doing what, even if we do not always have recorded documentation. Though there is a fair amount of recordings a few years after the fact - Clara Smith, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey (all veternas of those shows) and others, plus incredible reissuings of Paramount and Brunswick and Gennett that reflect what was still a very active minstrel/medicine show circuit. So I think there is still a lot to go on (also reading Tom Fletcher's book on early black showbiz) -

not sure - however, I was listening to an old live recording recently and I thought - that sounds like Tony Williams -

omigod - do we have confirmation that this even exists?

thanks, Dan, I will probably take you up on that, I appreciate it - as to a previous post, Wynton who? let us just say that it is my opinion that the origins of the blues are mixed in between country sources and minstrel sources- and that the post-Reconstruction black minstrel show, and it's transformation into a variety of entertainments that had minstrelsy at their core, were ultimately not only liberating to African American performers but revolutionary for American music. There is a tendency to describe the blues in almost religious terms, and to not grant that it had some broader entertainment values that were related to not only blackface traditions but also styles of singing and playing that are much different than that of the country blues - one does not dismiss American racism by seeing the black minstrel/medicine/traveling show as taking that tradition far from its demeaning sources. I must also credit a book that came out a few years ago, Ragged But Right (by Doug Seroff and Lynn Abbot) with confirming what had been, for me, an anecdotal sense that this was the way to look at the blues and its beginnings. If I can do it right I think this can be an important look at the full scale of what blues performance is. The other side of this coin is that, as I've been thinking about all this, I have come around full circle in my own ideas about the blues (especially since taking up the guitar). My own feeling is somewhat strangely akin to that of Crouch and Marsalis, in regarding the blues as essential - but not as they define essential - it is essential to MY OWN playing and my own music; it certainly is NOT essential to many other jazz musicians. And there is nothing wrong with that, I think. To each his own - I also now believe (and this is a recent theory) that the blues is essentially a vertical style, and that the reason I do not find most jazz players convincing as they play the blues is that they are horizontal players (sorry Jim, to start this old argument again). Of course, having decided that, than why is Bird such a great blues player? More on that later - but in looking at the verticalness off the blues I find the first and second generation of avant gardist to having been onto something important in their essential rejection of horizontal playing - which of course begs the question of Ornette - more on that later,also - but also back to Larry Kart's piece on Ornette, which I need to go back to but which describes him, if I recall at all correctly, as being a "pre-tonal" player - and more on that later, too - one last important thing in minstrelsy is that it is in the early form that we first hear of the singer and instrumentalist in a call and response relationship - the obligatto, I believe it is called, of the instrumentalist accompanying the singer. Something that is essential to the blues. And yes to Emmett Miller. This is a major undertaking; hope I can turn it into a book contract, though I'm not optimistic; that would be helpful in "paying" for my time, but we'll see what happens -

nicest man I ever met!

damn - I was just reading about some new projects he was involved in - one had to have either seen that original Zappa group, or have listened to the recordings, to know what a hip drummer he was -

well, he did make that sex video - no, wait, that was Rob Lowe - also no relation - funny how this thread should pop up again, as last night I was listening to the old Ray McKinley band (1940s) and thinking, wow, what a great soloist Mundell Lowe was - glad to see he is still breathing (unlike most of my relatives) -