AllenLowe

I think I disagree - but would have to pull the CDs and listen - I recall things which made me think it was him, but it's been a long time since I listened -

I tend to think that for Max's generation of musician, the kind of vertical playing that dominates in the post-Elvin era does not come naturally; I've heard Roy Haynes do it very nicely, but than, he was a much different kind of drummer than Max. I have heard Max play some wonderful solo drums (Boston, circa 1975) that to me nearly reached such a synthesis; his group playing has, to me, been less successful -

who are the sidemen?

"Would your use of horizontal vs. vertical fit with Tony Williams' development (from a terrific unorthodox "horizontal" player to a mostly rather boring "vertically oriented" player)? Not sure I get this terminology... " Williams is a weird case; not sure what happened to him, but he really lost his individuality. My feeling is that drum playing for many became more "vertical" after Elvin, as the time-keeping emphasis moved away fom the high hat and ride cymbal and got spread around the drum set - the drum sound became almost more suspended, and vertical in the sense that the time keeping centered more around ringing and responant sounds that sustained themselves above and around the beat instead of maintaining a metronomic relationship to the beat - I realize this is a little vague, but it's somewhat akin to the differnce betwen Lester Young (vertical player) and Coleman Hwakins (horizontal) - the vertical player is more concerned with longer-held sounds or notes that suspend themselves above and around the points of rhythmic demarcation; the horizontal player is basically walking in a relatively straight and continuous line. Of course, this is an over-simplification, but also similar to the type of things George Russell talks about with modal (vertical) improvisers as opposed to those who move horizontally through a succession of arpeggio defined (or really referenced) chord skips - to carry this to its extreme, Rashid Ali, playing out of time, is more a vertical player; Joe Jones, with linear time, is a horizontal player - the beboppers, to a large extent, began the integration of the vertical and the horrizontal - the "bombs" and accents being vertical interruptions of the horizontal beat -

I see the style of many post-Elvin drummers as being more vertically oriented - as being concerned more and more with the rising sound of the drums, of the momentary blast and resonance of the set, as opposed to the (horizontal) propulsion that we might conventionally call swing - I see Max as trying to emulate this vertical wave of sound, but in doing so becoming somewhat turgid in his playing - not having (possibly because of ingrained musical habits) the feel for making the connection/transition between these vertical outbursts and the horizontal idea of keeping (ie swing) time. it also involves a personal miscalculation of his talents, IMHO. It's like Paul Bley saying that ultimately the Sonny Rollins of Our Man In Jazz was a worthy experiement, but that Sonny needed to return to the area he knew best - standard chord changes - in order to advance his own personal art. I feel the same way about Max -

and it's interesting, because I know people who think he doesn't swing on Bird's records, or on Saxophone Collossus, because, I think, they don't understand the profoundly mechanistic aspects of his style - machine-like, yes, and that, in some ways, is exactly the point. I see that style of playing as an explicit rejection fo certain bourgeouisie musical values, as much of early bebop, in its speeed of execution, implicitly was. It represents a deeper mode of feeling than certain kinds of sentiment. but I don't think that is the issue, for me, on the later recordings, in which he appears to be so intent on altering the sound of his playing to fit newer styles that he's lost sight of the connection between the vertical and horizontal aspect of his playing. It all becomes more vertical; this might work with some drummers, but to my ears it doesn't always work with Roach -

I like marches - and I think they can swing -

was Monk the leader on that? I was unaware of that -

"Max Roach selling T-shirts to make a buck, now that's a disgrace" don't worry about Max - he was one of the highest paid acts in jazz for the last twenty years or so of his career - I booked him for the New Haven Jazz Festival and it cost a small fortune - the reason he's not in the Burns movie is that he demanded payment before he would go on camera - no other subject got paid, so that was that - Max is a complicated guy - known privately in the jazz world as a great humanitarian, with many private and helpful gestures toward other musicians; a brilliant guy, as we can see in interviews, yet prone to some silly historical and social judgements on the subject of race - yet an advocate of Tristano, of Dave Tough, Buddy Rich, Johnny Carisi, and others; and once said to me "I never cared what color my musicians were as long as they could play." Also made, as I recall, some anti-semitic statements in Notes and Tones; beat up Abby Lincoln; was known to have some real personal problems int he 52nd Street days (one pianist from those days said to me, "if you were walking down the street and saw Max, you crossed to the other side, because if he asked you for something like money you could not refuse.") the most technically astonishing drummer in jazz, in my opinion - yet a lot of his post 1960s work I find self-consciously "modern," as though in trying to keep up with the times he'd forgotten certain fundamentals and lost some of his sense of swing (which to begin with was unconventional - like a brilliant and emotional machine, I would say, and that is NOT a criticism - as a matter of fact, his mechanistic side is what I find most fascinating and "modern" about his playing) -

no, but they did find the sheet music for "I Concentrate on You" -

maybe I should send Adolf a copy of "Jews in Hell" -

"there's some aura of feminine "family warmth" to Allen" well, I do some flower arranging on weekends, and I occasionally retain water -

"but what does that have to do specifically with Nicole Mitchell? " beats me; I never heard of her. I was responding to Larry. But I think my formalist complaints apply directly to his comments on programatticism - (new word)

he was a helluva drummer - or was that Goering?

zank you -

I wonder if this is a put on - in 1986 it seems unlikely that he had been listening to CDs "for years" - as I recall they came into existence in the early 1980s, though I could be wrong - if true, however, this confirms my suspicions that a former music teacher I had was actually Hitler - and here he is (I always thought there was a resemblance):

Bill Evans's wife told me Getz, on the road, was always trying to pick up the other musicians' wives - fun guy, he was -

thanks, Larry, for posting your original: "By "travelogue-ish" I mean that the music often strikes me as overtly pictorial/illustrative in mood, like the soundtrack for a travelogue, and not as concerned with what might be called "language principles" as I would wish. That is, if one's goals are dramatic/illustrative and the "plot" elements/what is to be illustrated are more or less pre-determined, then you'll be making musical choices more on the basis of what will tell on those fronts, which however tasty your ear might be will often be stuff that you and your audience already know/recognize/associate with the moods involved. For an Ellington, of course, a whiff or more than a whiff of the programmatic/illustrative often drove him to the compositional heights, but in my experience that's uncommon among composers (Berlioz might be another one of those). I guess the difference is that with those two the presence of external drama/program fired their musical imaginations as much or more than anything else. But IMO that's a rare thing. " on the money, as usual - lately I've been trying to formulate a more specific rationale for a lot of music that I am finding dull and problematic; "formalist" is the word I've used, though I once got labeled "Stalinist" for using it (the Soviets used to use the charge of formalism as a way of quashing art that wasn't simple and realistic and representational). I mean something far different (I hope); there are certain kinds of music/composition/performance these days in which the performer has decided that the way to a creative means of expression is primarily through an exploitation of formal elements - as though form can be detached from content, as though the style or means of expression is independent of the intellectual content or the ideas or the deeper structure of the work (in another area, someone who comes to mind immediately is Kubrick, whose later worke, from 2001 on was, IMHO, terrible) - I'm not sure if I am making myself clear enough, but I find it troubling/annoying/boring when an artist finds a means of expression within an art form - say, for example, in music, the drone - and thinks this mere discovery is enough - that it is sufficient to just repeat the gesture in order to make art. Or, to just improvise in an open or free manner; or to just use a scale; or to just use noise. Those are all useful elements, but they can be fed into a computer and looped an-nauseam; the performer/composer is supposed, to my way of thinking, to be a mediator, someone who takes these ideas as form or technique and part of a larger whole in which elements are co-dependent,and orders them in a way that makes the whole into a work of art - and, there is a difference, to my way of thinking, between mannerism and style, between gimmick and idea, which is obscured by a lot of the very amateurish music I hear, particularly in the "alt music" field, in the little alt performance spaces where I've heard a lot of such things - this does not rule out certain kinds of random and free expression - but without a larger means of organization (and I am very open about what those means can be) you have a very dead-end kind of formalism, I think. Things are repeated over and over in uninteresting ways, cliches are masked by advocacy of formal experimentation and by attacks on those who would even question the expression, as though the very questioning of such things, the very act of holding them up for critical consideration, is an attack on freedom of will and freedom of expression - and that is my speech for today on why there is so much music in the world I do not like -

it's a very nice CD, very good sound - I would only comment on Hentoff saying: "I yearn to listen to Bix Beiderbecke directly, so I can hear what Louis Armstrong heard" by suggesting that there's plenty of extremely well-recorded Bix that shows clearly what Atrmstrong was saying - good sound, good transfers, crystal clear - time for Nat to take his thumbs out of his ears -

wanting to either buy it or trade for it or get a CDR; email me at alowe@maine.rr.com thanks -

Braxton has said that Mosca was one of his prime influences, interestingly enough -

glad you guys did that but PLEASeE don''t pass over the Geeshie Wiley cuts so quickly; they are the most important on the whole soundtrack - Last Kind Words Blues is one of the most amazing performances in the American vernacular, IMHO - little is known about her, but her recordings are quite amazing -

glad this came up - Anthony Braxton asked me recently if I knew of any notated Max Roach solos for a class he will be teaching, but I was stumped - anybody here have a source?

few people know that Saskatchewan is a hot bed of funky soul -

I hope I have not offended the gods - just in case, however, I will now offer a sacrifice: the only one left is: Maynard Ferguson and his Orch. Live at Peacock Lane Hollywood January 6, 1957 - not to be confused with the Fresh Sound; this one is on Jazz Hour, and is priced for $79 on Amazon, which it ain't worth. So I'm willing to part with it for....$25 act now and I'll throw in three virgins and a a goat -