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AllenLowe

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Everything posted by AllenLowe

  1. thanks, Jon - is there a site where one good hear decent examples of the music you are talking about?
  2. "but at his best, he was one of the last real bluesmen, albeit from Connecticut/NYC." don't want to get into the insult game, guys, we can discuss this in a semi-adult way (at least that's how my wife considers me) - I usually avoid posting about people I know, always afraid they'll see it if it's critical, but I doubt Loren Mazzacane hangs out here, so - to me, he's part of the problem with a lot of the music you admire and/or produce - I've gone on about this before, but this all to me represents a new kind of formalism, a misguided belief by musicans that just because they have found a new gesture, or at least one that they think sounds new, that they have nade a signifdcant formal discovery - and than they drive it into the ground. A good idea is not necessarily a good organizing principle, or a way of life and music, and this is the problem with a lot of drone stuff, noise stuff, electro-acoustical. And that's Mazzacane - he came up with a very interesting idea for sound and basic phrase organization - and has been doing the same thing for 30 years (I first heard him in the late 1970s in New Haven) - it's a perversion of Cage I think (or maybe not) - and a persistent problem in the field. Listening to these guys being praised reminds me of all the cinema majors I listened to in the 1960s and 1970s - all they talked about was some "amazing" camera angle, an incredible splash of color, or the subtextual rhythm of a scene in some worthless Bertolucci movie - but there was more to Goddard and Antonioni and Bresson than, and there is more to new music now - it's the difference between an idea and a gimmick, mannerism and style - of course I won't make the same mistake you make, and generalize about it, call it "dead" or stagnant - I'm always listening and there is a lot of fresh stuff coming out. It just needs more brains and discipline. Time will tell -
  3. funny, but the idea of using the higher intervals and using appropriate changes sounds more like a Tatum thing to me - kind of a method for chromatic substitution, maybe - also, glad someone mentioned Larry Gushee, who has become a good friend during his summers here in Maine. One of the great curmudgeons of the jazz history world, and he and I battle it out every year about verifable and unverifiable "facts." He's a great man -
  4. "both of those guys did their best work before when I'm talking about, Hemphill hit his peak with his first two records." only if you've never heared them in person, but even recording wise this is not true - listen to Roswell on my American Song Project , just for starters, and when I did 3 nights with him at Sweet Basil in the early 1990s with my Louis Armstrong show, the bandstand seemed to levitate. Ask Loren Schoenberg, who was there, and not necessarily a fan of "free" playing -he was ecstatic - as "live" performers they kept it going in amazing ways. Also, per Hemphill, his big band record is the probably the best jazz orchestral writing done in the last 40 years; his sextet was incredible; and listen to him on my New Tango CD; playing with him at the Knitting Factory was an experience that will not be repeated - "my point is that nothing truly new has emerged within jazz for decades, and I believe it's impossible at this point because of the limits of jazz as an art form. the same boundaries that make something "jazz" or not are what's prevented it from continuing to develop, there's simply no room. don't get me wrong, jazz was a crucial building block in the history of improvisation, but it's a historic art form at this point. improvisation, on the other hand, is very much alive and well and flourishing on a global scale." yikes, don't know where to start on this - Julius, for one, and his development of the horn quartet and sextet; Zorn for obvious reasons (Spillane and Morricone discs in particualr, also Naked City); Tim Berne, completely unqique compositional style and method of organizing it; the late Andy Shapiro, the most talent synth/jeyboard player I have ever heard (basically undocumented on CD, but just ask anybody in Vermont) - Matt Shipp, who has fused certain keyboard approaches in ways whic are unprecedented; I hear new-sounding stuff all the time, and I'm old and out of it up in Maine. I'm sure the guys here can be much more forthcoming. And I'll mention my own guitar playing, which Larry Kart has called "unprecedented" - though you may prefer Mazzacane, who I like personally, but, damn, is really an amateur -
  5. yes, one left, just sent you a message - I hold it until you reply -
  6. my writing is analog as well, in real time, though occasionally I will do overdubs -
  7. it's yours - one set left -
  8. Jon - don't lump it all together - I know you find improvisation boring - I just read an on-line interview you gave - but having stood on stages with Roswell Rudd and Julius Hemphill, AFTER the Ford administration, I will say that you are missing some of the work of the Gods by making such generalizations.
  9. I have 2, 4 volume sets (36 cds in all) of Devilin' Tune promos - unsealed but mint, each 4 volume set for $100 plus shipping - paypal preferred; email me at alowe@maine.rr.com I prefer not to break up the sets, but if they don't sell in a few days I might be willing to part with them for $30 each volume-
  10. I used to play weddings with Bob Neloms in the 1980s, and he always told me there are two tunes you don't play at a wedding: I Can't Get Started and Slow Boat to China - aside from that, you're on your own.
  11. well - and I honestly felt this way even before they gave me a good review - I think they, along with Cadence, try more than any other publications to keep up with what new musicians are doing and saying. It doesn't always (or even often) work, but at least they are engaged with that world. I find this somewhat satisfying and, as I said before, important as documentation, at the very least - another interesting thing is that they, unlike most jazz publications, seem to have made a special effort to deal with women musicians. We forget how sexist the jazz world continues to be - after all, aside from me before my operation, how many women post here? Probably can count them on our fingers - if that's your idea of a good time -
  12. never did recieve the French review - do you have a copy? What publication was it in? forgot to mention, also, that Celmentine won the Nobel Peace Prize for that vaccine he developed to cure all child cancers - and how can anybody who has a reference letter from Mother Theresa be all bad? And I'm looking forward to that next on-air interview with Terry Gross - hopefull by than he'll have gotten his Congressional Medal of Honor -
  13. geez guys, S to N just gave me a nice full page review in the fall 2007 issue - so they can do no wrong for me - and I will say, though I have some deep philosophicall problems with much of the new music presented in their pages (I talk about his in my liner notes to Jews in Hell; suffice to say that so much of that music represents a generation that has learned to talk the talk but still plays the same-old warmed-over new-age-sounding, semi-drone cliches; same problem with The Wire. Every year I get that damned issue with the Wiretapper CD of new music and every year I am astounded at how crappy and tired most of it is) - it at least it gives a sense, like no other contemporary music publication, of what people are doing musically, for better or worse. And Bill, don't let Clementine get to you - he and I used to fight all the time, until I found out that he volunteers at the local soup kitchen every Sunday, rescues stray kittens in his spare time, knits quilts with the names of Iraqui civilian casualties on them, hosts a Fresh Air Fund child every summer, runs the local Dachsund Rescue League, runs bake sales for the Junior League, and organizes yearly visits to the fomer World Trade Center for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
  14. how about: "New Jersey: We don't smell as bad as we Used To"
  15. Peggy Cass was an actress who was in a series years ago with some chimps - and than became a constant presence on the game show circuit - also used to do a lot of "local" touring theater - had a raspy voice -
  16. I return to some of my original post on this - the key to doing the music right is knowing it, and I don't necessarily mean sociologically, though that helps - and on this I am something of a fey aesthete; play that hillbilly music after you've locked yourself in a room for 5 years with nothing but hicks and other country boys on the stereo (or really the mono) and when that music comes out of your pores than play it. That's what I did. There is limit to what irony can do as a technique, and I think that we, as a creative society, have hit that limit. It's the reason that I don't really like Chadbourne's country stuff, or Camper Von Chadbourne; and interestingly enough, for all his alleged superiority to the material, Zappa did rock and roll brilliantly, because he really knew it and understood it, and I really believe he loved the music no matter what he said about it. When I saw Zappa at Columbia University in 1968 he summoned Sam the Sham to the stage from the audience. He and the band huddled and they did a letter-perfect version of Wooly Bully. For Zappa, that was real truth, no matter what he professed to think of his audience and the music they listened to. So it might be with Iverson, and Bad Plus. I did hear Iverson play solo about 6 years ago and he was excellent, as a matter of fact he reminded me of Jaki Byard at times. and he did a very nice version of The Windmills of Your Mind.
  17. actually, tits to die for - literally -
  18. there is the recording Brown made with Lou Donaldson - in which he skips to the Lou - (or is it the Loo?).
  19. that woman's a fanatical dick-taker -
  20. must have been something he ATE -
  21. only thing I have is a quote from Dave Schildkraut who told me Bird said to him, "you gotta hear this new trumpet player who plays with big skips."
  22. "It's as though someone were making an enraged charge of rape while attacking themselves fore and aft with a dildo -- and doing so in broad daylight right out in front of the local saloon." ah, I see enough of that at home -
  23. well, I'll think about that - interesting, Larry's comments on Harrison's occasional lack of rationality - because this does explain, as I think back, some weird logical glitches that I've always thought I spotted in Harrison's work, but discounted because he seemed so damned smart - another reminder to always look at things with a cold critical eye, no matter how well established the source - so Larry, I am going to have to re-read your book now -
  24. I'm going to say this here, instead of sending Mr. Kart an email; there are only a handful a truly great critics in American culture, at least as I see it, and he's one of them - the mark of how good that article is, is that, as I read it, I kept saying, "crap, he's right - but I would have gone right past that without seeing the point that Larry saw and makes so clearly." there's only a few other writers who tend to inspire that in me - ironically, one is Max Harrison; Richard Gilman was another. One of the reasons that I stopped writing much was that I felt that in order to do it right, one really has to devote the time, and as I've sunk into the abyss of day-job land, I have less and less time. I now feel even more inadequate - thanks, Larry -
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