AllenLowe

love the Copenhagen - the Bechet/Armstrong strikes me as a little heavy in the lower mids - I wonder if rolling off a little bit in the mids (maybe 500 hz notched as narrowly as possible) and adding more above maybe 3K might bring more out in the recording - might also bring out some more hiss, but make it sound a little less congested - depending, of course, what's there, as acoustic recordings are tricky to work with -

actually, Clementine is Martin Williams -

I thought he was talking about Mortimer Adler -

I told this story a while back (so please don't mention this to dumpy mama) - around 1978 Al Haig was booked to play the West End in NYC, and he said to me, "I'm bringing a guitar player you have to hear." so the night of the gig, there was young guy, Bobby Broom - wow! outplayed everybody -

great stuff - more spirit than a barrel of young lions-

YOU WILL LISTEN TO WHAT I TELL YOU TO LISTEN TO OR FACE HIS WRATH

"Islamist called Goldberg?" what better disguise is there? They caught him with one copy of the Koran and two copies of Hot Dog -

and, by the way, all academics are whores (except my mother, who was a saint)

"Some of you sound like you're being coerced into listening to certain artists. If you don't like 'em, ignore 'em. I like & listen to whoever sounds good to me. Stanley Crouch never forced me to buy a CD. " well, I'm not so sure - since people like Stanley Crouch control what is recorded, they control what you can buy and what you will buy - so, as you, robot-like (nothing personal - we're all robots on this bus) go to purchase that CD you are truly under the Lincon Center Mind Control Program -

and Bev, you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater - the key is the nature of that analysis, whether it has any life to it, rather than being a dead academic exercise - the great critics - my old friend Gilman, Larry kart, Eric Bentley, Larry Gushee, Lawrence Levine, et all, are always engaged with the thing they are analyzing as part of of a living and breathing day-to-day life force and not some abstract intellectual system. Don't blame them for the bad critical work that is done in the name of the academy -

the problem with what tradition has become, is that Marsalis, Crouch, et all have turned it into just another weapon to beat their enemies with - the key is understanding that history is important not because it's good for you, but because it's so damned complex and inter-related, and that to use history is to use it to one's own ends, not as a middle-class entitlement (sorta like a Great Books program for musicains; you Chicago guys will know what I'm talking about); in truth, the most interesting muscians I have known have almost always had some kind of historical consciousness, but they used it like a part of themselves, not like a how-to booklet of proper technique (think Ros Rudd, Hemphill, Jaki Byard, Marc Ribot, Matt Shipp) - same think with rockers like Bloomfield or Hendrix - the historical side becomes a natural part of the expression, deepens and broadens it, even for audiences who have no idea why it resonates to well- the other side of this is the a-historicism of so many people today; every week I listen to This American Life and I think, "these guys live in a weird a-historic vacuume; they have no idea half of this stuff has already been done." Not unlike some of the jazz musicians we are talking about - if you don't know history you may very well become just a clueless repeater pencil -

"everybody already knows there's no difference between Monster Cable and coat hangers" hey; abortion arguments belong in the political forum -

two words: Homeland Security (well, maybe another word: Guantanamo; visiting hours are alternate Thursdays)

there was apparently a Selmer saxophone ad, I think, in which Maini secretly exposed himself - the nice think about the Gibbs-band Maini solos is that it is the fully mature Maini - on some of the early stuff (there's also a session with Kenny Drew) his playing is good but fairly straight-on; on the Gibbs he has a wonderful, slithering quality to his time that actually sounds a bit like Dave Schildkruat, to whom he may very well have been listening - from what I've heard he shot himself during a game of Russian Roulette - was quite a character, hung out with Lenny Bruce. Joe Albany, fellow junkie, remembered him fondly -

"just don't get why people have to be so jaded and negative" actually, Jim, the active involvement with this music, in the postive or negative sense, is the OPPOSITE of jaded - jaded would be to say, "oh, I've heard it all, I don't need to talk about it because I have heard it all and it's all the same and I know what I like and that's it and I won't even engage in arguments." We are not jaded if we are constatnly listening and searching - our lack of acceptance of what is handed to us by the mainstream defines the oppposite meaning of jaded - and there's nothing wrong with novelty for its own sake - sometimes it's a way out of the middle-class maze - as I once said about a musician, "fortunately he has more imagination than taste."

Maini was great; I think his best playing is on the Terry Gibbs big band; he's also on a Mingus quartet on Debut, with Bill Triglia and Jimmy Knepper; as Joe Albany told me, "Joe Maini was hung."

missing the point, guys - we don;t hate these people - we just dislike some of the music they play - some of it IS worse than other (like, for example, my response to the Mehldau solo performance - that performance was truly offensive in its self absorption, and needs to be cited as such; I had a visceral reaction, true, and it was justified) - I don;t sit around listening to the dead jazzers and whistle about the old days - I YEARN for novelty, for someone to look at this music from a fresh perspective - and I find this on occasion (saw a weird punk rock improv band last year at a little book store; they were fresh and original and creative and as good as any better-known jazz group I have seen recently; saw Iverson solo about 5 years ago; reminded me of Jaki Byard in his ability to reinvent his material; saw Joe McPhee around the same time; always new and self-challenging; reading Marshall McLuhan - original thinker, sees things that nobody else sees but which are right in front of us) - so it's not a question of comparison with the big guys of yester-year - hey, listen to ROswell RUdd; at age 70+ he's still inventing; the music I played with Julius Hemphill 15 years ago has more immediacy and freshness than a barrel of these guys - listen to 1970s thrash; No New York - sounds newer today than most of the jazz I hear -

well, as somebody once said - dying is easy - COMEDY is hard -

and I think that poem is unfair; I don;t know of any serious student of any art form who is truly like that - it builds on a "type" that itself is virtually non-existent -

not long ago I was reading a book of Richard Gilman's critcism and he expressed an admiration for art that, to paraphrase him , predicts the next thing we will think, the next gesture we will be making; it tells us what we will be doing and thinking next - and this is a perfect description of Coltrane, Ornette, Bud Powell, Louis Armstrong - but not of Josh Redman. and more recently I was reading Marshall McLuchan who, interestingly enough, says much the same thing about important "new" media - such media tell us not necessarily what we already know is "happening", but the effect of of events, the next thing that those events will lead to, the next ideas and gestures that will be made in response to those events, before those gestures are even made. this is a very high and difficult standard for art, but it is a necessary standard; without it, things would just, well, come to a stop -

and I don't find jazz boring per se, I find the current practice of jazz boring, frequently - which is why I play, to find a solution to this problem of boring jazz.

"Despite the fancy critical schemes we can build up, discussions or arguments about humanities seem to always boil down to tastes and preferences, relativism rules not absolute standards" that's fine for you - notice we don't attack those of you who have that particular perspective - just realize that to me (and not just to me) music isn't simply as serious as life, it is life - strangely, as I have gotten older, virtually nothing else interests me besides the occasional novel, the JFK assassination, and some other politics - and those other things, much as they interest me, remain external. Music (and not just jazz) has become like another appendage, for better or for worse. I'm not crazy, btw, about relativist arguments; by this standard Kenny g = Josh Redman; it's just a matter of personal preference; as a a perspective, it will get you in trouble - I mean, why crticize Cheney? he has his perspective, I have mine -

"it definitely seems true that there is an enormous amount of negative energy directed to those musicians who achieved mainstream success but not for the right reasons or for playing music that is/was too conventional. Or perhaps the number of positive/negative messages are balanced the emotional vehemence is certainly on the side of the detractors. I do find this unfortunate and even a little sad. There are artists I don't care for and a handful I really dislike, but I don't feel it is my life's purpose to tell other people to avoid them (not saying that you should hold your tongue or that I want to enforce civility on the board -- just saying it is unfortunate)." silly - has nothing to do with conventional or uncoventional but with substantive criticisms based on content and quality - sure, people who dont like stuff tend to be a little stronger in their opinions - this is called life - we are not telling people to avoid them, we are just saying why we don't like them; imagine if these same kind of standards you advocate were applied to politics - what right do we have to tell those Republicans they shouldn't support that war, starve those children, give money to those rich corporations? It's all so negative - well, some of us take jazz as seriouly as we take politics, and think that the same rigorous intellectual standards should apply -

and, btw, the problem is not just with jazz -

but if you all want to be serious about this matter - it ain't enough to say, "hey these guys are out there living the life " - so are Karl Rove and Pat Buchanan - big friggin' deal - the problem as I see it is that the whole system of how we produce and distribute and listen to music is completely outmoded - and I'm not talking about downloads/cds/lps/format wars/blue light/pooper scoopers- I mean the reasons and the way we make music, the length of performances, the way of presenting them and selling them - 45 minute sets here, a whole 2 hour concert there, three hours of Keith Jarett masturbating, 12 hours of Mehldau doing the hoky-poky - throw in Diana Krall doing the Dance of the Virgin with Elvis Costello, along with Eric Clapton on guitar - it's all become so boring that the challenge is to do it differently, to cut and paste the music into something resembling interesting art performances - so it doesn't matter how far Redman has come - he is working in a dead medium, so, from an artistic perspective, he is wasting his time and ours - this, by the way, is just my opinion, before everybody reminds me of that - but jeez I am SO BORED with jazz -