AllenLowe

the sound is variable but Document, at least in its original issues, is a priceless label - their goal was basically to issue all African American recordings, and no one else came near the scope of what they did - HOWEVER - in their second incarnation (they went out of business and than were resuscitated) they started to "improve" the sound, which meant digital distortion and other horrors - so beware the later series of stuff -

Guarnieri really had his own thing - and I want to reiterate how Crow-Jim his treatment was, in the historical sense - same with Art Hodes, who I saw at the same restaurant where I saw Guarnieri (Hanratty's in NYC in the 1970s) -

I'd sacrifice a virgin if I could find one -

I'm actually a pagan -

I tell you, hearing him in person was like listening to a peer of Fats Waller -

well, I'm Jewish, too, but I've retired from jazz - I'm now a Bubble Gum Rocker -

only if they know their haftorah -

"Most American "Jews" are Ashkenazi Jews who have little consanguineous ties to ancient Israel. In reality, most "converted" to this religious-belief system for their personal advantage." most did this for personal advantage? I assume you have statistical support for this? Polls, interviews? let me quote myself, anyway: Jews Like Me: Adoration of the Fourth Stream A recent book, by Steven Lee Beeber (The Heebie Jeebies at CBGBS) tries to reduce all Jewish post-modernist musical activity to the practices of Punk; would that this were simply a marketing ploy for the book, which gets so much wrong in the introduction that it’s hard to slog through its increasingly intellectually muddy pages. Suffice to say that, in it, Lenny Bruce is reduced to street-punk comedian, a questionable idea supported through quotes from dubious authorities (like the band Blondie’s Chris Stein) who, it is clear, have not really listened very closely to Lenny Bruce but appreciate him most as a cultural icon and conveniently hip reference, a name to be dropped as proof of coolness credentials. Symptomatic of this book and the cultural niche that it represents, Chris Stein is a perfect example of what I referred to earlier as a post-literate generation: media saturated from film, television and magazines, and increasingly adept at the kind of intellectual name-dropping shortcuts that this particular book takes on nearly every page. Lenny Bruce himself would have scoffed at being labeled a part of punk, probably would have cracked wise, as William Burroughs did, that a punk was simply a guy who took it while bending over in prison (shades of critics desperate to link Robert Johnson to all that is rock and roll). Bruce was part of a much more complicated socio-intellectual heritage than Chris Stein, a narcissistic figure if there ever was one (see Gary Valentine’s book on the Punk years), would ever take the time to understand. It’s simply not enough that, as Stein notes, he, like Bruce, has shtupped a Shiksa Goddess (in Stein’s case Blondie herself, Deborah Harry). Lenny Bruce, a brilliant ironist macho man, was much more than the sum of his Shiksa-humping escapades. It would have been more illuminating, though inconvenient for this book’s misguided theme, if the author of the book or his editor, Yuval Taylor, had looked a little more deeply into the whole post-War Jewish cultural picture, had shown more than a nodding acquaintance with Bruce and his particular ethos, his influence(s) and associations. Because no matter how far you stretch reality or how creatively you market a book, old-time hipsters ain’t punks. Interestingly enough, the person who gets it most right in The Heebie Jeebies at CBGBS, in an interview, is the guitarist Marc Ribot (who is on this compact disc), whose perspective on the Jew in post-modern America is intellectually complex yet startling clear, a reflection of real-time experience and thus much closer to explaining the spirit and source of Jewish cultural success. What Beeber and Yuval Taylor miss entirely is that it’s not punk-attitude but real-world socio-intellectual integration that gives Jews their cultural edge. The source of their cultural strength may be seen most particularly in the Yiddish working-class’s tradition of persistent intellectual striving, a tradition that remained strong in the United States even as Jews moved in droves, after World War II, into the middle class. The working class poets and novelists, minstrels, socialists and comedians who flocked to New York’s Lower East Side and elsewhere in the early part of the 20th century set the tone for continuous Jewish cultural achievement, reaching as they did a true accommodation between the functional quality of art and it’s transcendent qualities, understanding as they did both life’s pathos and deep humor; for one related example, the Jewish poets that Josef Stalin murdered in so-called revolutionary Russia were dangerous precisely because of that, because of their intimate knowledge of all sides of life, a knowledge, that, in its true integration with the abstractions of art, amounted to a metaphysical threat to the established order. So it is with not just punk rockers but with outsider comedians like Lenny Bruce, with brilliant musical sharpies like Ribot, geniuses like Davey Schildkraut or amazingly adventurous over-achievers like Mike Bloomfield (who, curiously enough, is never even mentioned in the book, probably because he does not fit its glib punk thesis). And so it seems from my own experiences here in Maine; Jews like us no longer face physical extinction but something which, in the moment (if only in the moment), feels like even more of a threat: intellectual extinction. If history is left to books like this one, well, than, the old phrase that starts “with friends like you” takes on new meaning (and I won’t even get into the book’s butchering of the phrase alta cocker, which, if near the derivation claimed for it, is completely misunderstood – oy, these goyim editors!). As a post-script, let me add that the dual spirits of Lenny Bruce and Mike Bloomfield hover, inevitably, over my intents and efforts, and on a daily basis. Bruce is one of those cultural icons whose work, thankfully, holds up well in retrospect, his bits and commentaries still funny, trenchant and insightful after all these years. Both of these men were prototype post-modernist (non-punk) Jews, and that may be why I admire them both so much and why I so identify with their lives, with the peculiar arc of inevitable failure that both seemed, so intently and intensely, to live and pursue. Bloomfield, a manic-insomniac with too many projects and interests and ideas, was a real Jew (to quote Annie Hall) as was Bruce. They were dual post-modernists to the core: determined to know everything within reach as it related to their own private interests and obsessions; broadly curious but never indiscriminate in their love and desire for pop culture; reverent toward, but not quite up to pursuing with any intellectual consistency, the highbrow intellectual ideas and ideals of their forefathers; able to look both backwards and forward at the same time, to revere the past but with a cynical and cold eye towards its complexities and contradictions and myths; bitterly determined in personal creative matters, despite intense outside resistance – real and delusional - and hell-bent on fusing the ancient ideal of meditative self awareness with good, old fashioned, latter-day American personal self-destruction. Who wouldn’t identify with all of that? And let me add that Jewish musicians, from Louis Moreau Gottschalk to Doc Pomus to Mike Bloomfield to Dave Schildkraut, represent a movement of permanent post-modernism (our version of the permanent revolution, with apologies to all of those who suffered the brutalities of Mao and his agents), a vernacular hybrid musical 4th stream of memory, obsession, and aggressive self-interrogation (which is often mistaken for self-hate). We/they are a cult without a leader, freelance wise-asses without portfolio. This is my contribution to that Fourth Stream.

my view is even stranger - when I log in, everything is upside down, large serpents are lashing out at me with their tongues, playboy bunnies are dancing the hula, and Chet Huntley is lecturing me on the evils of drag racing - must be the LSD I took last night - Niko, I'd liked to get rid of everything except the playboy bunnies -

I think you owe me $56.27 -

merde! no can reado -

thinking about Sweet Apple, Iowa -

sorry again - see, this is why I've got myself on my own ignore list -

"Here's a new rule, Alan Lowe's posts don't count" Here's a new rule, Holly Golightly's posts don't count Here's a new rule, Major Holley's posts don't count Here's a new rule, Major Major's posts don't count

you shoulda moved to Maine - love it here -

I own every record ever recorded - I'm especially proud of my Lithuanian language records -

is this that crazy Downbeat woman? and let's face it, Larry, many a musican has said that to you just before you wrote a review -

Profoundly Blue - Charlie Christian with Meade Lux Lewis on celeste -

don't know - I always fall asleep before the end - not bored - just gettting old -

I'll ask her as soon as she wakes up -

hmmmmm....Canada IS close - and they've got real healthcare -

they are vertically integrated and control the sale and marketing - if they wanted, the prices could be drastically reduced - not to mention how much direct production and drilling they do - as in the offshore USA -

jazzshrink - do you give an Organissimo discount? Don't want any of that Jungian/Freudian crap, get that electro-shock machine charged up, I'm on my way -

but as Lenny Bruce said, never confess to that affair - even if she walks in on you: "She's just a friend -" "Than why was she lying on top of you?" "We were trying to see who's taller - hey, she came into the room with a sign around her neck that said 'somebody lay on top of me or I'll die' - what else could I do?"

I figure if they don't like me they gotta be lesbians -