AllenLowe

just don't expect me to flash the audience at the end and burn my guitar - that's more of an Organissimo thing. I'm just getting too old, and I'm tired of getting hit in the face with women's underwear -

tangential, perhaps, but I think Jim Sallis's book on guitar is excellent - it's basically a series of profiles covering most styles -

let's not forget Junior Barnard of the Bob Wills band -

not to worry. Let me know if you need an opening act -

Tom Storer is right on the money - and I tend to find musicians who know something about their own history to be more interesting - but first of all one has to test oneself in a way that is blind- in other words, listen to the music without preconceptions and decide, without context, necessarily, whether you like it or not - hard to do, perhaps, but I always find it an interesting exercise to listen in my car and make a judgment when I have no idea who is playing. I get some interesting results - I even liked a Wynton piece once, very much - so who knows? When I do this, more often than not I find myself NOT liking musicians whom I normally admire. And most of the stuff I DO like is on a local indie rock show (of course I am a complete jazz burnout these days). Clem, I know what you mean about Abercrombie and Hall, but I like Abercrombie in particular; problem is that I cannot STAND the sound of most jazz guitar - I think these CDs should have a warning "not to listen to while operating heavy machinery."

yeah, he's a rude boy - not sure why the moderators put up with his stuff -

"Screw you, Lowe." as usual, Gould is his eloquent self. What's s'matter Dan, the wife walk out on you again?

ah, Gould is trying to stir up trouble again.... as I understand Jim's post, he was saying nothing of the kind. My own feelings on this are complicated - I often find musicians who produce some wonderful things and than seem to fade out creatively - and it often occurs to me that an "uneducated" musician will often have this happen to him/her becaue they have so little to fall back on for development or inspiration. In other words, one listens to all that other music and one learns the "literature" not for "legitamacy" but in order to nourish one's own sources of inpiration and change. Without these other resources to fall back on there is often a very sudden artistic failure (and I won't name names here; I'm with Cuscuna on this); when I look at some of the geniuses I admire in other forms I see how they approached history - take George Buchner, who was one of the greatest dramatic geniuses ever, comparable to Shakespeare IMHO - and he literally invented a new form of theater - and he was completely steeped in the classic forms. For a musician, this does not mean he/she has to play in those forms, but it certainly helps to know they exist. I am regularly discouraged by a current generation's a-historicism. Every time, for example, I listen to the radio show This American Life I am astounded by the repetition of ideas and forms I have heard before, but which those who are doing the repeating think are new and novel. the problem in this age of Marsalis/Crouch is that "tradition" has become a means of regression instead of progress. But I think of Jaki Byard, who was truly forever young, always listening and always absorbing things. One has to get older, but one does not have to become "old" -

I know, but who wants everybody licking cds?

a few semi-relevant thoughts on this whole debate. THere is a conservative position that says you cannot break the rules unless you know them; what this means is, well, I cannot issue an opinion on that LP until I hear the OTHER Lp of that guy playing "inside;" of course this makes little sense. Is an abstrtact expressionist painting of less value if the painter cannot do a still life? On the other hand, I'll bet that Pollock drew very well in a representational way. But Duke Jordan could not play stride and neither could Al Haig. So not everyone can do every particular style in a comfortable way. And one of the most interesting things in this realm was told to me years ago by Dave Schildkraut, citing another musician, and I quote: "he told me 'I never felt comfortable with bebop, never felt I could play that style and never felt I could be a jazz musician until I heard Coltrane and realized there was another way I could fit in'." HE was....Joe Henderson. Certain not a guy weak on fundamentals.

well, whenever, every once in a while, I find one of my CDs in a used bin, I always say to myself, "hey, who the hell didn't like my CD enough to hold onto it? It's a sacred text." Now I'm thinking, good; they should fingerprint everybody who disposes of a CD to a store for re-sale, put 'em in a data base, and make 'em traceable. That way I can send nasty letters and emails to the ingrates. go, Republican enemies of free speech! We wanna see what Berigan returns -

and give me a break, EVERYBODY knew who was a junkie in those days, so that particular aspect of Weinstock's response indicates, to me, that he was not being completely candid -

well, I would not expect Weinstock to say, "yes, I took advantage of junkies..." look, responsibility here works both ways; musicians had the ability to say no, to change their lives...but Dave Schildkruat, who had a clear head and no substance problem, considered Weinstock to be manipulative in this way. And look at the contrast between musicians' regard for Bluenote versus Prestige: a world of difference which reflects more equitable business practices. And I knew Jackie McLean well enough for a time to discuss this, and he clearly felt he was taken advantage of at a particularly vulnerable point in his life. He was willing to take personal responsibility for his lifestyle, but that does not justify other actions by other people. But even more to the point, let's look at the contracts and royalty statements. I'm willing to bet we'd find some interesting differences between Riverside and Bluenote and Prestige - and just look at the sessions on both labels. The "hit and run" quality of so many of Prestige's issues is a good indicator of a specific corporate attitude. Great as so much of the music was -

from what I've been told by some of the musicians involved, Weinstock at Prestige had a tendency to find the guys who were strung out and needed quick cash, get 'em in and out of the studio, and release the session quickly. Kind of a junkie express -

these internal jazz fights - of those schooled vs those unschooled - have been going on for some time and are complicated. A good friend of mine, pianist for Mingus's last group, got himself in some trouble for comparing two sets of personnel from that group in similar terms - when, as he said to me, he was making less a value judgment than an objective evaluation about schooling vs self-taught aspects. I don't think that this is what Cuscuna is doing, and he may have his point, though it is difficult without having names to compare. My feeling is that the first generation of free jazzers, for all their mishugas, set a direction and an aesthetic that changed everybody's idea of sound and composition; take Miles, who said they were all full of shit and than started to play the same way as they did, if with different strictures. As for myself, I tend to listen to fragments of all these players, because it is in the fragments that I find the moments of idea and inspiration. But this is a problem that continues to this day, and I know that many people will disagree with me (it's my old argument about formalism, but I won get into that again) -

it's been a while since I returned it, but it has a bit of a guilty-white-liberal tone to it - it just repeats and repeats things which are basically true, and after a while it's like a hammer over the head about the importance of the African-American musical tradition. It's not that this is incorrect, but it has a weird, pandering quality to it in its repetitiousness - Kenny - yes, I have the LP of that band - important stuff, and an important side of the N.O. aesthetic that is too often ignored -

I have a bootleg CD of a rather amazing concert from one of the schools -

yes, amazing book -

bad book, in my opinion; I bought it and than returned it - two problems, as I see it - 1) a bit politically correct - reiterates the same sociological pieties/cliches over and over - but - the biggest problem is that 2) Brothers, who says he is writing the book to help place Armstrong in the vernacular musical culture of New Orleans, knows virtually nothing about that music and culture as it relates to anything other than jazz. I've long thought that to understand New Orleans and it's cultural significance one has to look at the big picture, and not just jazz - Brothers sets out to do that but it soon becomes clear that he knows nothign about the other streams of music, from Cajun to blues and rhtyhm and blues to string bands, that populate New Orleans. Nothing. So he ends up repeating certain cliches about African Amercan culture and history, without giving specifics, because he does not know specifics. Sorry to come down so hard on this book, but in my opinion if you want to get a sense of why New Orleans is what it is musically, the best book I have ever read is Dr. John's autobiography -

careful - once you start downloading Murray's stuff they will up the price in the middle of a download - at least that's what Murray does when he's hired to play a gig - usually during intermission he asks for more money -

I like the Wilder Octets - clever and musically interesting -

actually, I didn't tell the whole story about my meeting Martin Luther King at Coney Island in 1962 - we were talking, and he said, "you know, Al, I have this speech coming up in Washington that I have to make, but I'm just not sure I can do it - I'm just so tired and discouraged." So I looked him in the eye and said to him, "Look, Marty, you can't just do this like the everyday stuff - you gotta dream about it, don't let 'em get you down, you gotta have a dream, you gotta follow that dream." I don't know what happened after that, but it did seem to cheer him up -

and note that Hentoff, in his infinite wisdom, takes no special notice of Schildkraut's extraordinary performance -

when I opened for him at the Stamford Center for the Arts sometime in the 1980s, I made a wrong turn and accidentally wandered into Ray Charles's dressing room. Boy did he look old and shrunken; the Raelets up close also looked tired and bored. better NOT to see your idols up close -

Davey was telling me once about the stereotypes people hold about jazz musicians. and said that about ten years after these sessions he ran into Handy on the subway. Handy said to him, "Dave, are you still on the junk?" Davey never took a drug in his life but figured there was nothing he could do so he just answered "no" - thanks, Larry, for posting about this - on top of everything else, Dave had the most personal sense of rhythm of any player I ever heard. he told me that he always tried to think a few measures ahead in the tune, and that this was something Bird had taught him. I think this accounts in part for how "off" but right his playing sounds -