AllenLowe

Professor Bop is my favorite - as I mentioned, Sonny Rollin's recording debut - "take a song like auld lang syne than you add a bebop line - don't call a cop - call Professor Bop" (I'm forgetting a few words here but you get the idea) -

just to add to what Larry said, I don't think it really matters if Ornette can play "inside" - it's like arguments over whether an abstract expressionist painter can draw "realistically" - what matters is the work, though I used to be a little more conservative on this subject (spent too much time at too many sessions with players who could not play, including a lot of pseudo free-jazzers) - Dave Schildkraut once told me something very interesting that Joe Henderson said to him - that Henderson never felt he could be a participant when bebop was the prevailing style, as he did not think he could really play it in that style; but that he was completely liberated by Coltrane, et al, who showed that there was another way to go. Let's use another comparison - Duke Jordan could not play anything like James P Johnson; doesn't mean his own playing wasn't real jazz. Any musician who so totally creates his own frame of refernce, as Ornette does, has nothing to prove -

both have 10 fingers - that's enough in common for me -

"For great improvisors like Parker or Marsh, I would imagine that the sound is the idea. There is no separation ... So I'm not sure what Ornette's amazing distinction is. .. but then, I guess I just can't understand whatever it is I'm supposed to about Ornette in general ..." well, yes and no, re Parker and Marsh - never in the radical way that Ornette is presenting the idea, in my opinion - what Ornette is really suggesting is a unity of voice/expression/sound which is truly as old as the hills, and yet which gets lost in modern musical techniques. It is the integration of the voice with the notes/sounds that the voice is making in a way which goes the way of its own logic as opposed to being superimposed on a pre-ordained "sequence," as Ornette is saying, and is unfettered by things like required chord changes or rigid song form- I'll quote Harry Partch (a composer) here as well, because he is talking about the same thing, I think: “The ancient Greek and Chinese conception – as old as history - that music is poetry, has deteriorated…even when words are used they are merely a vehicle for tones. The voice is just another violin or another cello… with this metamorphosis…the ancient conception…was obscured, left to folk peoples – sailors, soldiers, gypsies…troubadours, Meistersingers, the Japanese Noh and kabuki, the folk music of England and our own southern mountains, the pure Negro spiritual (not ‘symphonized’) - hearers are transported not by mass but subtlety…the true music of the individual.” Partch is reacting to Western harmony as codified by Bach, and proposing a different kind of approach, as is Ornette - it's so old that it's new, as they say - for another approach to Ornette that I thing gets to some of the same points, read Larry Kart's essay on Ornette and "pre-tonal" music, collected in his book (and soon to be a major motion picture) - This is not saying that Bird's sound is irrelevant to his ideas- it's not, and neither is Armstrong's or Morton's, etc etc. Their sounds just have a somewhat different relationship to what they are playing than with the neo-folk technique Ornette is advocating.

actually I agree with him on that one - I think it was a Ryko reissue for which I did the sound restoration and the notes - we were never really sure what the final product was going to be and it was often a mess -

"It's like playing in tune. if you can't , like Ornette can't, you develop a system called harmolodics. If you can, you record Ko Ko or Love Supreme." uh, is there someone out there who still thinks Ornette can't play? Even Stanley Crouch has come around. This was quite a fascinating article - Ornette always has great insights, and really, to my way of thinking, nails the important things - like "Isn’t it amazing that sound causes the idea to sound the way it is, more than the idea?” the kind of thinking that Wynton (and quite a few others) will never really understand -

was funny to me -

"Babs was a hip guy" - Joe Albany he was one of the few singers that other jazz musicians seemed to like - has an interesting autobiography, if you can find it - not a great singer, but some nice ideas, and is on the first recording session Sonny Rollins ever made, I believe (Professor Bop, I think, reissued on Blue Note) -

I will add another comment - I feel that academics who are so bent on creating a schematic social context do a disservice to not only the musicans but to the music - they place a sociological burden upon the musicians that deprives them of their personal and artistic freedom. It's like Stanley Crouch telling Anthony Davis that he's not black enough; it's like labels like Generation X or the 1960s Generation, the kind of Time magazine shorthand that simplifies everything and strips it of its real meaning. I remember Harold Rosenberg writing in disgust about critics who tried to place him and others in a certain 1930s-1940s pre-and post-War American intellectual category; Rosenberg said that his own influences and interests were much wider than some narrow school, that he admired Europeans and many people outside of the scope of that category - this to me epitomizes the grand weakness of contextualization, whether done glibly by journalists or "smartly" by academics.

I shouldn't have gone to sleep, seems I missed a lot here - I want to cite Richard Gilman, an old professor of mine, taught theater, but understood principles that applied to any kind of art form - Gilman was always weary of approaches to the history of any art form that merely tried to situated that form historically and socially; the act of artistic creation, he said, (and I paraphrase, will have to dig out the book) constitutes, at its best, a counter-history, an aesthetic alternative to the prevailing social order. Try and try as they might, academics rarely if ever change our aesthetic judgement of the music - yes, it is interesting to see what musicians were doing and why, and useful to understand the social construct within which they played - but I will say that I have been listening to jazz since 1968, from the tender age of 14, and the more I have learned about the social context of jazz the less it has meant - the music still creates its own reality, regardless of time and place. That's why I keep coming back to it; if it was merely a sociological curiousity I (and you guys) would have tired of it years ago -

and what Imus said had nothing to do with politics - he just made comments about Clinton's sex life - now that took guts -

I'm going to mention one of my own CDs, "New Tango '92" which represents an approach to a whole slew of Latin influences - and I mention it BECAUSE it has Jeff Fuller, one of the greatest Latin bassists ever (he's worked with Paquito and Hilton Ruiz among others) - and Julius Hemphill, who is brilliant on it. All in all I think it's a successful fusion -

once again it's like the typical after-the-fact political rationalization - same as with the bebop quote about making something white guys could not steal. That's good to hear, Larry, because it further puts the contextualizers in their place. I've always said that most musicians, on the level of creation and pleasure, are color blind - there's an interview with Bobby Bland in which he talks about how much he loved Hank Williams and the Grand Ol Opry; and lets not forget how influentual Konitz and Tristano were on the 2nd generation of avant gardists; Julius Hemphill was particulary forthright in this, always talking about how Konitz made him understand that there were other way to play, outside of typical bebop lines - not to mention how much Jelly Roll Morton liked opera, and how much Armstrong liked the whole run of pop music -

and nobody's mentioned COlbert at the correspondents dinner, in which he took on Bush while the Prez was sitting right next to him - took some guts, as this is rarely (actually never) done at these events -

I'm with Clem- I hate the new Django clones - all speed and notes.

there's nothing wrong with guides that contain succint evaluations - Max Harrison has done great work in this respect. But shallow is shallow; sometmes it's like reading jazz's version of Cliff Notes. Forgot that Valerie was Bish's ex; she once sent me a friendly email (which I will not print here) - I knew and worked with Walter Bishop, one of the nicest people who ever was in the biz; and he was a real friend to Joe Albany in Joe's last sad days. Come on, Val, you know we're not hiding here; you seem to have retreated after your hit-and-run - as for Ballliet - he has done some very valuable work, especially his interviews, which are brilliant - read the ones with Red Allen and Pee Wee Russell and you'll see what I mean. His biggest problem is his poor mimicing of the music with language - his performance descriptions are invariably pretensious, silly, and just plain innaccurate. But he has written some very smart stuff; you just have to get through the things which are insufferable -

good thing I'm completely chicken-shit - I woulda just called the cops - but I understand the outrage -

strange thing is, last time I saw Alice Coltrane was - in Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, probably in the spring of 1972, when I was at U of M. Sorry to say that I fell asleep - honestly I did. The solos went on just a LITTLE too long...

I think Zorn is a perfect target - he's rich and powerful and isolated and a celeb - it's when comedians go after the weak and powerless that I object - which is part of the reason I got tired of Howard Stern - though he liked to compare himself to Lenny Bruce, Stern's MO was just the opposite; he went after people who rarely fought back, whereas Bruce (as with Colbert) went fter the powerful -

hey Val, anybody who knows me know that there's nothing I would say on this forum that I would not say in public - and have said on many occasions. I use my real name, am happy to furnish my address and or phone, picture, drivers license, whatever you want. But I never say one thing when I mean another, and I never hide behind a hidden identiity - like maybe Valerie B -

*bing* two points -

I do think that you often get musicians who feel that the style they've been trained in - like bebop - has become something of a straitjacket - like Paul Bley, for example, or Coltrane, who needed to expand and go on. Of course, someone like Ornette is particularly unique - just a genius who heard things in a new way, and it's unlikley that he was ever a bebopper in any way, shape, or form, though bebop was, I think, an important frame of reference for him. Maybe it's the tension between the various factors - the old forms as played by musicians who feel like they've played all they can play, the new ideas that the old forms inspire, the visionaries who just hear things in different ways or who see different relationships between traditional elements, who see them fitting together in new ways. Jaki Byard was another guy who said that by the middle 1950s he'd done as much as he could do with bebop and had to keep doing new things to keep himself interested. Ditto Mingus. In theater you have similar things happening (though you might not know it to look at contemporary plays) - by the middle 1950s the worn out gestures of the typical realistic/social play gave way to Becett/Waiting for Godot, which (though not historically alone) had a revolutionary effect, working as it did with still relatively traditional elements like scen and language, but transforming them so entirely. It does seem that certain forms just hit a wall and that the most curious artists tend to try and find ways around or over that wall - and jazz consumes itself particularly quickly, as musicians play so much and so continually that it demands freshness and renewal in ever-quickening cycles.

well, it took them 5 years to issue the first two - so I'm just hoping everything goes smoothly -

I've always been suspicious of that quote (and others to the same effect) as after-the-fact. All I know is that in my many conversations with Al Haig (and he was a close friend) he never expressed that feeling about the music, or indicated that he was ever in any way considered an outsider. He was definitely a disciple (he told me Dizzy showed him not only the chords but the voicings) but than so were a lot of people in his relative position, black and white. And it's a moot point, ultimately, as there were so many white beboppers, who could steal away -

not a bad idea - also will mention that if the next two volumes ever get issued, there's actually some Dexter on there somewhere (I think) -