AllenLowe

one of my favorite Beach Boy songs -

actually, if it's triplets, who knows which one is married to Jack Black? I hear that even he is uncertain -

actually, I believe she is married to Jack Black -

hmmmm....can I fight the urge to make a "bone" joke?

changed my life - left nut fell off, and my hormone levels went through the roof -

I think it's a straw man argument: "CDs most accurately capture the clarity of musical performances" who says that musical performances are of necessity "clear" ? the soundstage of life can be complex, ambient, can have frequency conflict, bad balance, et al, conflicting and uneven dynamics - the problem with digital is not just a problem of digital but of common isolation techniques - the placement of each instrument on its own and isolated track(s) creates, onces things are mixed, a strangely un-natural sum of the parts - everything is just too co-equal, even if the mix is intelligently done - add the lack of ambience in many digital recordings that is a function of either digital itself and/or the use of dead-sounding rooms (the idea is to add all acoustical qualities in the mix) and you have all the ingredients for a strange and cold multi-track stew - and beyond that, what they are talking about in terms of analog fullness has NOTHING to do with a needle tracking on an lp - it has to do with what I would call aural depth of field, a different and fuller soundstage that is indeed warmer for it's slight distortion, and/or the sense that the sound is on the edge of distorting - I don't need an LP to proves this, I can hear it on a good 2 track tape machine, where no needle is encountering any grooves - this idea that it's all numbers and that all numbers are thus equal in fidelity has long been disproved - otherwise we'd be recording in 8 bit word lengths -

it's been a while but I recall that Webster Young's playing was not very good on that Billie Holiday record - I like much better the bootleg LPs I have of jam sessions in 'DC -

Hubert Sumlin -

"and just because Parker got head from random white women while high and sucking on chicken bones in the back of a taxi" now, this is why I became a jazz musician in the first place - it was a choice between a pension plan and a taxi ride -

Bobo the Elephant is my second cousin - on my uncle's side -

did you approve the minutes of last month's meeting? any clowns show up?

interesting thing in person was what a great rock and roller he was, how seamlessly the band could move around, stylistically - for all his sarcasm I always believed Zappa had a deep love for classic rock and roll - and the band would alternate these incredibly complex, Varese-type lines with abrupt crudity, mix in Wooly Bully (with Sam the Sham sitting in), go into a faux country tune, and then hit a long piece like King Kong - quite amazing, really

listen to the ensemble pieces on The Yellow Shark CD - here was a guy who gave life to new music in a way that one thousand academics could not, because he felt it, lived it, and HAD to compose, as opposed to doing it for tenure and Faculty Night.

you had to have seen Zappa in person to realize what a brilliant musician he was, and what a brilliant band he had, especially the 1968 version that I saw at Columbia University - as for "there are always new directions to go in music, but at this point, those are outside of jazz's boundaries. " bespoken by someone who has missed a lot of music -

yeah but I find the whole thing to be false, too glib - another, I think, of Dylan's pronounements that have false resonance - like saying he used to be older - also, on another level, given the choice of being robbed by a six shooter or a fountain pen, I'll take the fountain pen -

of course, we are thereby saying that Cheney and Bush are honest - as was Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer -

"but the current jazz era of regurgitation and recapitulation goes against everything jazz originally stood for: delving into new territory, exploding through what were thought to be barriers" gross oversimplification, I think - jazz has never "stood for" anthing, I don't think, except a very personal kind of self expression and entertainment - I don't think Armstrong in, say, the 1930s, thought he was exploring new territory, though he was doing so anyway; he was not, however, "exploding" through barriers but crossing them through a kind of unintended subversive stealth. One of the reasons for the music's early brilliance was how unselfconscious it was. And the music has periodically felt the need to recapitulate - hence a great quote from Phillip Larken, that in jazz "the past refuses to be over; the whole of history continues to happen simultaneously." the problem is evaluating the use of history in the music, and some of us are very careful in essence about how we do this (sorry to self promote, but listen to my cd for further reference here) - personally I happen to love the history of the music, but I explore that history NOT because "it's good for me" (the very middle-class notion expounded by Lincoln Center and things like The Great Books Program, IMHO) but because it's like constant food for expression. my biggest complaint about a lot of new work is that it is completely tied up with the process of making music and not the musical result itself, ignoring the dictum that new work needs to explore new states of consciousness; hence, as well, my dislike of Beefheart, who to my way of thinking found only one state of consciousness and ran with it ad nauseum to the point of boorishness - I feel the same way about guitarists like Loren Mazzacane, who have confused mannerism with style, a gesture with an idea - but we've had this argument before, I know. Jazz is far from dead; it just, as I think Zappa said, smells funny -

I like a lot of Third Stream - the whole Brandeis concert, for one -

Ageism alert: "He halted conversation throughout the restaurant with a couple of solos that displayed the energy of a 25-year-old" uh, let us just say that most 25 year olds where I live haven't a clue - and us post-50 guys solo with PLENTY of energy -

or, conversely, to live inside the law, you must be a crook -

I'm having clown flashbacks - keep seeing Hilda naked, doing the Virgin Dance with Bobo the Elephant -

are you sure he wasn't talking about himself?

one of the Penguin Guides to Jazz CDs describes me as having a "cult" following - YOU THINK MANSON WAS EVIL? sorry, gotta go - Squeaky needs servicing -

happy birthday to the most honest record dealer I know - well, maybe the ONLY honest record dealer I know -

well, as long as I'm not in one of those books, I won't worry about it -