AllenLowe

1) I've written 5 books, at least, and mastered/restored about 2,000 songs that say otherwise. History of jazz, rock and roll, American music, and the blues. All with explanations, historical background, rationale, etc. You're not paying attention. All reasonably priced. 2) The curmudgeon label is really offensive. Also a-historical, showing a real lack of historical understanding of the place of criticism in music, literature, theater, etc. And it is horribly age-ist - dictionary definition: "a bad-tempered person, especially an old one." I am not bad tempered though I am definitely old. But when I dislike things I have reasons and I explain them. I refuse, as I do get older, to passively accept degrading stereotypes. And truthfully, this is the kind of personal b.s. that has chased me away on this forum on more than one occasion.

it's been long shown that that kind of trickle down theory just does not indicate reality. And unless you can document it through personal reports, sales, audience response, I wouldn't suggest it as reality. Seriously, please continue to question my ears and objective judgement. And I will question your taste. Somehow I don't think either of us will get too far.

his singing is just awful, has a horrible, flaccid quality to it - also, I didn't say he had been on America's Got Talent, just that he always appears to be on the show when he is singing. But that Moody thing is just....well, if I heard it blind I would think of it as just another soft jazz thing. Clearly I am fading into the minority here. He just sounds to me like the musical equivalent of processed food. And I think the Moody vocal sounds like the kind of bad singer who sits in at jam sessions and who you can't seem to get rid of.

....he's always preening for the judges on America's Got Talent. I ask because I just posted this on Facebook to a largely negative response. Yes, I know he's a great guitarist, but the last clip I saw of him he played mostly stock phrases and cliches. This is the price a jazz musician often pays for that kind of popularity. But his singing is slick and bland and shallow, to my ears.

to me Brubeck's playing was the equivalent of a card dealer who just kept shuffling the deck, over and over again, and never actually dealt the cards. It drove me nuts. Though it did inspire a new tune we just recorded for our Louis Armstrong project called: "Shufflin' the Deck: Take Five (Please)"

I've been worried about the same thing; will have to give him a call.

I was lucky enough to hear Ware in person once, with Monk around 1969. Though it was a long time ago, I can really remember his sound; I would say he played a lot of roots and fifths (from what i remember) and his time and sound just gave him a presence, hard to describe, and I don't think the recordings are quite the same. He was a mess, tried to borrow money from me, which I didn't do (I had about 10 dollars in my pocket and had to get home). As for Ron Carter, for some reason I have never liked his playing, his sound. Once Dick Katz said to me "I don't want to listen to Ron Carter and his booming bass," and at that I realized what I didn't like. The sound was just a thick mass to me the few times I saw him in person, and it lacked the more subtle soul of other bass players whom I liked better.

I'm sorry, there's no way we can excuse this kind of abusive behavior by Jacquet, no matter how great he was. Obviously I am not of that stature but I've been leading good-sized bands in complex musical situations for about 35 years and I would never treat anyone like that, and I have had a few difficult - and more than difficult - sideman. You don't like 'em? You fire 'em. And there is even less excuse for Jacquet, who was a well-paid star; if I can handle low-pay and no-pay gigs with obnoxious club owners, Jacquet can act like a grown up (and honestly, he wasn't that great a tenor player anyway; I always preferred his alto). This is part of the dues you pay as a leader. Patience, you suck it up, and you handle multiple personalities with care and diplomacy.

honestly I am not sure this is really such a significant find, being as there were many such figures in various places in the USA, and we have no documentation of what the music was like (and 1919 is really not that early in terms of our knowledge of pre-jazz, given the work that has been done on Jelly Roll Morton, Sweatman, Europe, others). I will re-read the story, though, since I've been rushing around. One thing also - William Pierson has pointed out that the original Klan dress was modeled on African examples of tribal dress. I wonder if these hooded riders were similar in reference and intent.

I will speak as someone who has written thousands of words of liner notes, some of which I might indeed reprint in a book some day. So yes, it would bug me if someone reproduced those notes without permission - and btw, Fair Use involves a very limited use of material, not complete reproduction.

Maceo Parker.

I honestly think this session is a major disappointment, though not a major surprise.

my feeling is that Webster at this point was all breath.

Roswell Rudd told me that Shepp is so famous in France that people were naming their babies after him.

Muriel Winston is actually pretty good - and she sounds more than a little bit like Abbey Lincoln. And that one track above by Hassan is extraordinary - and shows a very surprising Lenny Tristano influence.

I have read it, very nice piece. The ONLY thing I would suggest is that, even after all of these years, there is a somewhat misguided sense of Armstrong's importance as a great innovator of melody and rhythm - which he was; but I think his innovations, especially in the early years - 1925-1940 - are much more radically modernist, as I have posted before. He was, accidentally or not, exactly in tune with the new modernism of Dada, of Joyce, of new theater like King Ubu. His was a radical restructuring of traditional and recognizable elements, ingenious reordered so that the effect was of something both strange and familiar at the same time -

Ethan peruses this site regularly, and then gets mad when I don't defend him. So in case he is watching, let me say I intend to read this article and enjoy it, whether I like it or not.

I have no problem saying that, based on this one recording, Sleet (a druggie who died of cancer in 1986) is one of the best trumpeters I have ever heard. I have no idea how I missed this guy:

I figured my opinion would be counter to the general sense of things here; but I will tell you, listen to his 1964 recording of the album Now's the Time, and think about whether anything he has done in the last 40 years even comes close to what he was doing back then. I think it's a huge loss for jazz; on the other hand, he wouldn't be the first artist who did unbelievably important work, and then stalled out. Think Ralph Ellison, for one. It doesn't alter Sonny's legacy, which is gargantuan.

I have to confess, I remastered that for a Japanese label which then refused it, so I put it out myself. Interesting CD.

we should note that Sonny Rollins himself fired Jim Hall for this same reason, as he was under pressure in the 1960s not to have whites in his band.

I am very interested but I have a feeling Sonny still holds almost everything back. The most insightful thing I have ever heard about him was about 30 years ago from Jamil Nasser who said that Sonny early eccentricities - the bridge, the mohawk, the sabbiticals - were expressed when Coltrane ascended and really usurped Sonny's tenor dominance. Jamil felt that all of this was just a way of his trying to reassert his popularity, that it was random, aimless, and somewhat pointless. I tend to agree, to whit: right after this time he did his best playing ever, some of the best playing in the history of jazz (say, 1962-1968) before turning to what I would call (and this is not a popular opinion) an over-ripe, neo-pop style with a newly-dominant (and noisy) rhythm section, culminating in years and years of good but unfocused playing. At this point (yes, in my personal opinion) he just decided he was going to be popular, and though there were real, live sparks of what he could do, his body of work just ended up as - a body of work, inconsistent, crowded with empty performances (of both his and the band's). There is almost a weirdly disturbing hint of distorted ego in all of this, and I remember being really disgusted with his interivews in that movie (G-Man?) where, along with Lucille, everything seems almost totally self directed. And the rest was a kind of sordid artistic journey from nowhere to nothing. Sorry, that's how I feel. Sonny is one of the most important American artists of the 20th century, and genuinely nice guy to boot, and personally he has had a dominating effect on my own playing and musical approach; but he could still have been wildly popular and made plenty of money if he had learned how to be dispassionately self-critical (instead of doing so in a more radically self-rejecting way, as indicated by one passage I saw quoted). He has/had the right to do otherwise, and more power to him, but it doesn't mean we cannot evaluate his work realistically. So....I guess what I am saying is that I would be interested in the notebooks if they reflect a real inside look instead of one that, under the guise of telling all, is really still very sanitized, even if in a way that is deep and very carefully encoded.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1353950503Mailer_WhiteNegro.pdf

Pepper made frequent comments about his whiteness, many of them indicating a strong personal sensitivity at being considered less "authentic" because of his race. Absolutely, but not necessarily for the better.

I have gone through five stages with later Art Pepper: 1) I met and spent time with him when he came to Boston on his comeback tour, loved the guy, escorted him around town, and thought he was fantastic that night, though I noticed some oddness to his playing. He gave me a few copies of his current LPs which took me to 2) being frustrated with the recordings. He seemed to be working too hard to sound "contemporary" in a sort of post-early Coltrane way. A lot of stops and starts that just were dull in their ineffective tonal tangents. A "scream" here, a pounded note there, as though he was telling people "yes I have heard jazz in the last 20 years and here is my interpretation." But he was always best when he changed back to his linear style which, as with that night in Boston, had intensified and focused itself in profound ways. But it never lasted; I could not listen to these LPs, which bored and frustrated me; so 3) I stopped listening. There was just too much wrong with his current approach, which had substituted a kind of emotional self-expose while losing the true intensity of linear development. It was raw but it was not really revealing or indicative of any true artistic epiphany, but then.... 4) Some years later I went back and started listening again, to the Vanguard CDs, another with Duke Jordan, and I heard moments of real personal revelation, so I started listening again, enjoying myself until.... 5) His personal history and artistic mis-advantures just started to repeat themselves; blues cliches substituting for real expression (and I do wonder if some of his personal racial self consciousness was starting to act in artistically self destructive ways), the same retreat into false tonal and harmonic exploration, just a weird kind of near-narcissistic emotional self-abuse. And now listening to a clip from one of these sessions, I feel like I cannot listen any more.