AllenLowe

apparently there is some dissent about the Europeans (and there's nothing to be ashamed about, Mike; it just shows that bigotry knows no boundaries) - I did, however, get the following email that makes a cogent argument for the other side: " 'not so advanced' what are you -insane. why were they all moving over here??? to get away from your horrible segregation - u numb nut -Robert Hancock " a formerly silent member of the forum?

gotta watch out for shorty george -

trying to move some boxes of Devilin Tune - will sell any or all volumes, 1-4 $40 each plus shipping conus ($6 priority, $3 media) email me at alowe@maine.rr.com paypal address is same

sorry I'm so slow on the response - I'm a little under the weather post-surgery - I'll shoot you an email with track list -

haig was a giant, which he remains in spite of some recent revelations - he is mentioned by virtually every one of the 2nd and 3rd generation of bebop pianists - eg Hank Jones, barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan - as the guy who offered an alterntive to Bud Powell for new pianists of that era. Also, and just as significantly (and this is something Bill Crow said to me years ago), he was considered to be the guy who codified the chord changes to the new tunes that were than coming into the jazz repertoire, all the standards that were expanding the music in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

actually that's almost exactly what Jaki Byard told me many years ago - he was observing that the Europeans racial attitudes were not necessarily so advanced, and pointed out that they assumed, in Jaki's words, that Dolphy was "just another black junkie,"and that Dolphy died because of it.

"I could burn the missing set for whomever, free of charge!" well, now you won't have to - looks like Bley did that already -

well, postal rates have gone up - here's what's left: Chico Hamilton Quintet with Eric Dolphy. Fresh Sound. May 1959, Dennis Budimir. $8 June Christy with Johnny Guarnieri. Vol 1. Jasmine. $7 John Carter. Fields. Gramavision. $16. Lucky Thompson. Lucky Strikes. OJC. $10 Ennio Morricone. Film Music Vol. 1 Virgin. $8 Ennio Morricone. iWestern, Italian RCA cd. $8. The Band Swings, Lorez Sings. King. $6 Paul Horn The Jazz Years Black Sun $10 or buy the whole batch for $675 plus shipping

Roach is one of those towering figures in AMerican life for whom I wish a real and accurate bio would be written - musically ecumenical, revolutionary musical figure, prone to violence and some terrible personal deeds, but also a great and private benefactor in an un-publicized way, from what I have been told. We tend to want our cultural heroes to be either/or, and he wsa definitely on anther plane in this respect. Capable of an angry anti-semitism on the one hand, but a dispassionate viewer of the whole black/white thing (this from a personal conversation). Somebody needs to write that book about him -

cds; prices include media shipping; prefer paypal; email me at alowe@maine.rr.com Mickey One: Stan Getz/Eddie Sauter Verve $8 Sonny Rollins: Way Out West: Original Master Recordings: Audio Fidelity. A boutique CD. Promo hole punched in corner. rare, I think, but who the hell knows?: $20 Chico Hamilton Quintet with Eric Dolphy. Fresh Sound. May 1959, Dennis Budimir. $8 June Christy with Johnny Guarnieri. Vol 1. Jasmine. $7 John Carter. Fields. Gramavision. $16. Lucky Thompson. Lucky Strikes. OJC. $10 Ennio Morricone. Film Music Vol. 1 Virgin. $8 Ennio Morricone. iWestern, Italian RCA cd. $8. The Band Swings, Lorez Sings. King. $6 Paul Horn The Jazz Years Black Sun $10 Ron McClure Trio: Beirach/Nussbaum. Inspiration. Ken Music. $8 Steve Lacy/Gil Evans: Paris Blues. Some scuffs. $6 or buy the whole batch for $775 plus shipping T

that might not have been a bad thing - no more nights snoozing at the Symphony -

when I heard him, Earl played real hard with a metal mouthpiece, a lot of chords, very hip - unlike anything I'd heard of him before; hope those LPs reflect this -

not sure where all this is going - I just had surgery, out of it for a few days and I come back to the land of alto legends - but let me add: 1) Earl Warren was one of the greatest alto players I ever heard in person, and 'tis a pity he never recorded in a solo context to any good effect - those several nights I saw him at the West End Cafe in the late 1970s showed he would have blown Benny Carter off any stand - 2) Pete Brown is another of my favorites along with Boyce Brown - no relation - 3) don't forget Hilton Jefferson and George Johnson - 4) I recently heard a STUNNING Horsecollar Williams alto solo on an old Etta Jones record - 5) sorry to hear there are so many alto players - I gave up tenor for alto because I thought there were too many damn tenorists -

all night sessions is auto-pilot bebop, much as I love Hawes - his best work is the live 1950s stuff Xanadu put out and that's now been bootleged elsewhere - alo as a sideman on the live Warell Gray that Xanadu put out - in these years he's a mad man, brilliantly inventive and hot. ALso, for a studio session, I like Green Leaves of Summer -

well the issue is bigger than Marsalis - someone is going to get the salary there, even if it is not him - the issue is the inflated salaries in the so-called non-profit world - and that's a REAL big can of worms -

just break into some houses - probably every old guy in town has some LPs -

don't know if this was addressed earlier, but there IS another Lester Young vocal, on the tune Just a Little Bit North of South Carolina - I had a tape of it once from Phil Schaap, and I think it's on some CD somewhere -

well, as someone (Louis Jordan?) said, what's the use of getting sober when you're just gonna get drunk again -

hmmmmmmm.............................. never wrote for amg - will have to lie down - horizontally - and think about this - or, will have to stand up - vertically - after the blood has rushed to my head - and think about it some more - but to answer your original question - about how he SHOULD have done it - Max should have called me first. I would have said: well, Max, think:royhayneselvinjonestonywilliamsbeforehefuckedupbywayofjojonesmaybealittlear ttaylorbutwithbettertimeanddon'tforgetshadowwilsonaltschsulalimichaelcarvinanddavetoughmaybealsotommybenfor butwhatthefuckdoiknowifallelsefailscallsangrey orgetadrummachine and have a nice day -

funny, I always think of it as a Shiksa trombone -

"how would you have had Max play from about 1964 or so onward and still remain true to Max Roach the person as well as Max Roach the musician as well as that person and that musician in those times that would be substantially different than how he actually did end up playing? You're not crazy about how he did it, fine, come up with an alternative. If the musician's primary duty is not necessarily to do, then hey, here's an opening for you to prove it. Come up with a plausible alternative Max Roach." c'mon, this is silly and besides the point - and thanks, Tom, for making those points far better than I did -

"The musician's role is to do, the critic's to interpret/understand/" Jim - once again I strongly disagree - and I think, in this way, jazz is WAY behind the other arts, in which many great and important practicioners were also great critical thinkers - Beckett, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Chekov, Charles Ives, George Bernard Shaw, Isaac Rosenfeld, Robert Lowell - all great artists who were also incisive critical thinkers. The fact that this kind of intellectual tradition is virtually non-existent in jazz, outside of academia, has hurt the music, I think - and off all people to complain, I find that you fit quite well into this perspective. and yes, it's personal preference, but not in some abstract uninformed way (I hope) but based on very specific musical reasoning - and once again, I think if musicians had more critical understanding of what they do, their creativity would not tend to wane in their elder years, as it so often does -

Jim - it's a much different thing in a group performance than it is in a duet like the one with Roach and Braxton. And Braxton loved that performance and still talks about it - I can see that you think I am over-analyzing the whole bad-modality thing but I have worked with enough mainstream musicians (meaning players who come from the bebop or the swing-to-bebop era) to know how those guys felt when they tried to conceptualize something which was just so outside of their experience and aesthetic as to be like a foreign language - they just didn't see how you could play something so outside and still resolve it to the inside; they had no real belief in the truth of this type of playing and so could only flail away in a simple and shallow scale-like fashion. It pains me to say it, but one of the real problems with Al Haig's late playing was his admiration for pianists who could work scales in this poly-tonal way; his method was to run major/minor scales with great speed, and his problem was that he ended up repeating himself because he was so tied to an "inside" way of playing that he just could not hear a way out of the bind he was in - also, I used to hear Barry Harris play "Un Poco Loco" and really fail, on the modal blowing section, to really get inside of it - same problem, same generation of musician - some could do it, but many could not -

easy, from an improviser's persepctive, to "misunderstand" modality, though it would probably bore most people here from a technical perspective - what I am reffering to is the mis-comprehension of the concept of modal playing in jazz, which for most musicians is not technically strictly "modal" but a way of playing vertically - there's that word again - against chords or tonal centers or scales that ususally move, as accompaniment, with less typical density than the chord accompaniments of bebop. For most jazz players modality is not simply the isolation of scale tones but a combination of those scale tones with the chromatric scale and the intervals of chromatic harmony; not that this isn't done in bebeop, but the techniques and ends are much different. Bebop players tend to resolve to chord tones and use chromatics as ways of connecting consonant tones; modal players tend to worry less about such resolution. But the KEY, when looking at how Pepper and Morgan misunderstand modality, is to see that they don't understand that modal or even free playing has its own kind of connectivity, a logic of melody and movement - to them modallity is simply a cluster of notes, a way of sliding up and down the scale, of dropping flourishes of sudden notes that sound, momentarily, "outside" but which are just empty musical gestures. and I know it's gonna piss you off as navel gazing, but I feel the same way about much of Max's newer approaches to drumming - and the idea of vertical versus horizontal, though intellecutally suspect to you, is KEY to what's gone wrong here. Sometimes you just gotta say that the Emperor isn't naked but that his clothes are hand-me-downs...

"But this whole thing about unfortunate attempts at "moderninity" or whatever you want to call it, I just ain't buying that in Max's case (or Land's, or Pepper's, or Sonny's). Whatever was lost (if anything was truly lost, and I'm in no ways convinced that it was...) what wasn't lost was the intergrity of an artist remaining true to themself in terms of responding to their environment. If that means "following" instead of "leading" to one extent or the other, oh well. So long as the end result is still distinctively whoever (and I defy anybody to find a Max Roach performance of the last 40 years that is not 100% immediately identifiable as Max Roach) then it's all good for me. I understand that many perople find a certain period of an artist's developement, take it really close to heart, and hear anything beyond that as "not the same". Fair enough. But geez, just for once I'd like to hear somebody simply say, "I don't like Mr. X's later work simply because it doesn't give to me what I want to hear from Mr. X" instead of "I don't like Mr. X's later work because he lost blah blah blah " Jim, I disagree strongly - critically it's URGENT that we deal with these things as reality, with the truth of a musician's CURRENT expression, because otherwise we risk a very basic dishonesty; we're not evaluating the musician in terms of the music he is actually playing but in terms of his history, of our attachment to this former work; this is actually, to my way of thinking, very condescending. The truth is, to cite only one of those you mentioned, Art Pepper showed a complete misunderstanding of the materials he wanted to use - modality and sonic experimentation - and this misunderstanding really warped certain aspects of this playing. I heard him a few times in those later years, and when he just played what he was feeling he was incredible; when he was self-consciously trying to be "contemporary" he was lost and distracted. To suspend our judgement of this musical turn or to reduce it to a simple "i don't like it" does no one any good; this applies to any art form, from film to the fine arts. (BTW, I feel the same way about Frank Morgan, who tries for modality and inevitabley falls far short ot it). Good criticism goes far beyong "I like it" or "I don't like it;" it offers an explanation, an examination of the reasons. THAT is why it is important for us to be as specific as possible.