AllenLowe

amen -

anybody want to see my transcription disc?

and we haven't even begun to discuss cylinders -

yes, that's true; I've broken many a 78 in my time -

"the completist mode of collection ... is the displacement of an anxiety over the wholeness of the body (and of the psychosexual emotional balance that goes with it) within a symbolic order: "the man [Gennari is quoting from Gabbard now] whose collection is complete has no gaps and thus no anxieties about what is not there. The serial collector seeks plentitude, the warding off of castration."" well, I always wondered why they had that hole in the middle of the record -

from the web (and this jibes witrh what I've been told): "ball the jack was 'to perform (the dance step introduced in the song)'. The usual sense of the expression, though, is 'to go fast; make haste', and this is often used in reference to railroad trains. This train-related use seems not to be the origin, however; jack 'a railroad locomotive' isn't found outside this phrase until later. (The phrase is verbal, which is why I said that it doesn't mean 'with great haste', but rather 'to do something with great haste'.) A slightly different sense is 'to work hard and efficiently'."

while it's true, Ghost, that the musicians I knew I knew best in the 1970s and 1980s, my main point was that academics tend to use unreliable techniques when trying to reconstruct hisotry - often because they do not know the music well, or have heard so little, or never knew any musicians. While it is true that Deveaux used McGhee as a prime source, there's a different question raised by this - of course McGhee is not going to complain about being the focus of a book about that era; I'm sure he was quite flattered. That doesn't mean that Deveaux did not make major miscalculation by using him and Hawkins as a focus - he did, and it distorts the whole book's perspective, in my opinion. But that's a separate issue. Tucker's comments about Holiday, to me, make it impossible to take her seriously - even George Bush makes an intelligent comment once in a while; his OTHER comments,however, make it imnpossible for me to take him seriously. Same with Tucker. As for Ogren, she is talking about the term "Ballin'", and it is not, in that song's context, a sexual reference, except to academics who are hopelssly out of it and trying to sound culturally aware, as she is.

well, I really had my tongue in my cheek, as the independents were still active - it's just that the musicians at the time were in tough shape, employment-wise, hence a lot of bad jazz/pop albums. Somewhat ironically, it was a perfect time to become a jazz listener, however (I started in 1968), as everything was cut out of the catalog, and one could find a bonanza of LPS that were under $2 in those days. That's how I learned about jazz, on the backs, as I later figured out, of unpaid jazz musicians (as royalties did not have to be paid on cutouts). It may also be the reason I was able to see Ornette and Mingus at Slugs for a $3 cover charge (found out years later that the little guy at a table speaking French was Jean Genet, but that's another story) -

"I think this nails it. I must say I disagree with Ornette on this point." but I think this is why Ornette is so damn smart - even when I think he's wrong, I also know that he's right, because everything he says is so correct for his way of thinking and playing - it's very similar to the way I feel when I read Larry Kart's criticism of Bill Evans - though I disagree with Larrry, I somehow know that he's absolutely right - a paradox -

that's OK - I just like to feel the blood rushing down -

if that's your idea of a good time...

anyway back to the point - they probably weren't playing much bebop in the late 1960s - was one of the worst times for jazz employment. Hence recordings like Lou Donaldson's Hot Dog. Funky time...

hey, don't insult the host, Chewy. You can hump the host, but don't insult him (to paraphrase Albee/Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe) -

I'm going to have to stand on my head -

well, not to beat a dead hearse here - but I've been recording lately with a trio, last week we recorded a nice blues and I went back and forth about what to call the damn thing on the new CD - finally came up with a title: "All the Blues You Could Play (if Stanely Crouch Was Your Uncle)" should go nicely on the new CD -

exactly - sort of like opening one door and finding another...however, I do think we hear hints toward the end that he was thinking of other ways to go (the duets with Rashid Ali, for example) -

Clem and I have kissed and made up from our old battling days... so there's hope for the Israelis and the Hezbollah -

ahh, it's ok - you just have to understand Esperanto -

well, we're not prejudging him - just basing our comments on our experiences with him, his intellectual dishonesty, his written attacks on people lilke Anthony Davis (whom he thinks isn't black enough because his music comes out of a tradition that Stanley sees as too Euroo), the fact that he physically attacked one guy and has threatened others (like Gene Santoro) - look, Stanely can be quite charming, and I've spent some time with him. He's also a bright guy, but he aint no genius, and his prose is not only tortured but unintentionally humorous in its badly executed slang-ese. And the way he and Wynton have made a fetish of "the blues" is particualry repulsive - I will quote a letter that I wrote to the NY Times a few years ago and that was pub;ished in the Arts and Leisure section: To the Editor: While I am second to none in my admiration for Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, I am becoming increasingly weary of Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch's politicization of the blues. In their hands (as with their fellow Lincoln Center advisor Albert Murray) the blues has become something of an ideology, a club with which to beat all who do not share their aesthetic leanings. Last year, Mr. Marsalis told us what a blues-dependent art Ellington's was [''Ellington at 100: Reveling in Life's Majesty,'' Jan. 17, 1999], when in truth Duke used the blues so effectively because he was not dependent on them, but rather came to them, in terms of class and background, as something of an outsider. Now Stanley Crouch comes to tell us that Armstrong ''figured out how to articulate the sound of the blues through Tin Pan Alley tunes without abandoning their harmonic underpinnings,'' and quotes Mr. Marsalis as saying that ''not even Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Monk and Coltrane did anything that sophisticated'' [''Wherever He Went, Joy Was Sure to Follow,'' March 12]. Once again, this is a case of fitting facts to ideology. Armstrong was truly a great blues player, but what he did most effectively was to expand the expressive possibilities of jazz in a way that made the blues only one element of many, in a manner that actually reduced their relative importance. Certainly Armstrong continued to play with the kind of tonal and rhythmic nuances that reflected the powerful dominance of the African-American performance tradition, but these were not necessarily related strictly to the blues. They reflected the larger picture of African-American performance styles. And Monk, Coltrane and, indeed, Charlie Parker devised musical systems that were every bit as sophisticated as Armstrong's. ALLEN LOWE South Portland, Me.

let me add, to support another of Larry's ponts - about having experienced something and than seeing it distorted as history - that I have known (some better than others) quite a few of the older generation of beboppers, most now dead -Schildkraut, Al Haig, Curley Russell, Tommmy Potter, Howard McGhee, Joe Albany, Duke Jordan, Harold Ashby (who was sort of in-between), Skinny Burgan (great bass player), Bill Triglia, Jimmy Knepper, Jaki Byard - and one after another they have told me, if not always in so many words, about how warped they felt most of the accounts they had read about the bebop era were, not all by academics, but many that were intended as scholarly works. It wasn't just the occasional objection that they made, it was a basic theme that seemed to run through their comments, and this was why it often took a while for me to befriend them, as they distrusted nearly anyone that they felt wanted to write about them in an historical sense. They just felt that everything they read bore little or no relationship to the life as they had lived it - teh truth is that they desired particularly to talk about the music itself, because that was what motivated them - their joy at playing it, their love of hearing and playing it, their love for the life itself and the freedom it offered them. I never see this reflected in an academic book -

Ghost - with all due respect I think you are missing the point - I love books that truly dig deeply into the sociology of music - the problem - and it is a BIG problem - is that the ones I read, particularly from academics, make bizarre and unforgiveable errors over and over. The most frequent reason is ideology and theory, a desire to fit the facts into the theory instead of the other way around - let's take Sherry Tucker, a perfect examople - in her book Swing Shift she talks about Billie Holiday going to California and trying to record with a very rough sounding, African American women's big band. She points out how Holiday was uncomfortable wit their accompaniment, and how Holiday kept asking them why they could not play like the Paul Whiteman band, with whom she had just recorded for Capitol Records. Tucker cites this as meaning that Holiday was ashamed of being black - OUCH - here we go - because Tucker does not understand that, for Holiday, this was an AESTHETIC issue - she liked a softer, less obtrusive background - she jumps at the chance to fit this into a social/ideological framework. Personally I find this a particularly repulsive example of academic/NJS perversion of the facts. But this kind of error is distressingly common. Or Cathy Ogren's book on Jazz in the 1920s - she cites the title of the song Ballin the Jack as having sexual reference - which it does not - that's just plain academic ignorance - or that other book - sorry, name and author escape me, I'll have to look it up, though I do cite it in my jazz history - who tells us, ina book written in the 1980s, of how Bessie Smith died because they would not admit her to a white hospital! Such approaches can be done well, and off the top of my head the ones I can think of who have done so are John Szwed, Larry Gushee (read his book on the Original Creole Band), Lewis Porter, Bill Russell - usually but not always musicians or former players who have actually spent some time witht he real musicians, though that, of course, does not guarantee results. Dan Morgenstern also rights very well with a true understanding of the social context(s) - it's just that there are so many bad books; I wish I could cite more, but I usually throw them against the wall - but name a few titles and it may refresh my memory -

just got an email saying that V 3 will be out in about a month - a little longer than they indicated last time; I will keep everyone informed -

more news - a volume 3 is supposed to be out any day, and volume 4 will definitely follow relatively quickly, or at least I am told - the distributor is unloading promos because of the new volume, so I've got about 5 more and that'll be it for a while, at least until the new volume is out - so 5 more available at $35 shipped media mail - shoot me an email at alowe@maine.rr.com - my paypal address is the same -

I hope they cut out the anti-semitic comments - which, as I remember, are rife in that book -

I think Larry's point of view is a little more complex than that - I see the crux as this line in Larry's post: "it's you who get to say that their views are or are not little more than those interests in action, as though that were the only option" - I don't think it's a matter of de-constructing a deconstruction; it's basically a matter of challenging a kind of false historical documentation, of questioning the authority that seems to come from a tenured position and a book contract -