AllenLowe

my biggest complaint about academic jazz history courses is that they tend to distill everything down to the SOS - not understanding or representing the fluidity of jazz (actual any music's) history, using over-simplified maps of cultural evolution. Either that or they are socially determinist to the detriment of really understanding the music, making errors as they try to fit history into ideology -

you can say that again -

thanks - that was a great group - Jeff is one of the greatest bass players I've ever heard, Ray an incredible drummer -

I remember that song - "I Think I'll Hang My Laundry Out To Dry" - sounds like a hip guy to me -

not sure what you're implying...should I have just let him give the wrong titles for Duke Ellington tunes, to confuse Bird's Dial and Savoy recordings, to identify Al Haig as Bud Powell...?

well, when he was a baby we used to call him young Lester -

1) I don't know if this is what Chuck is referring to, but I encountered Dixon at a few conferences in the 1980s and thought he was a bag of hot air - full of himself; on top of that he's a bore as a musician - IMHO 2) Funny about famous musicians teaching jazz history. Anthony Davis taught a jazz history course at Yale in the 1980s that I sat in on - he made a lot of historical errors, and I finally stopped attending, as I raised my hand so many times to make corrections that I felt like a wise-ass, even though I was not trying to be a know-it-all - I was just trying to set the record staight -

well, mine is 11 foot - but don't feel bad - it's not the size but the way you work the keys -

the quartet sides on "Dark is the Night..." were recorded live to 8 track in Verna Gillis's house - Roswell plays great on these and he once told me that he felt these captured his sound better than any recording he'd ever made - I'm proud to say I also engineered this. The trick was to use a good ribbon mike that could handle one of Roswell's blasts without overloading - the reason, I think, that he does not always sound right on his recordings is that engineers will use compression or limiting to deal with the volume problem, and this ALWAYS sounds fake - that plus isolation makes a lot of current recordings sound artificail, IMHO - that CD has a good room sound, everyone leaks into everyone else's mike, it sounds like people actually playing together -

do you guys know the story about the jazz group playing the Mafia bar in New Jersey? A guy comes over to the bandleader and says,"hey the boss would like to sing a song with youse." "Sure, fine, what would he like to sing?" "Strangers in the Night, in 5/4 time." So the boss comes up and starts singing: "Strangers in the fuckin' night, exchanging fuckin' glances, wondering in the fuckin' night, what were the fuckin' chances..."

yes - and I liked the naked scene with Glenn Close -

hey, at these prices I don't want to work too hard - covers are fine, if you hold 'em sideways you can probably look up her dress -

well, big mob bosses don't cry -

For Sale: LP: Charlie Parker: The Complete Savoy Studio Sessions - Box of 5 LPS in mint shape, nice booklet with notes and an interview with Teddy Reig. Everything and I mean everything on Savoy. $25 plus shipping in the US. The Very Best of Bird: The Dial Sessions: 2 mint LPs, Warner Brothers reissue, liner notes by Ross Russell, booklet with bad paintings. $15 plus shipping, in the US of A. Paypal preferred; email me at alowe@maine.rr.com, which is also my paypal address. make me an offer for both

I have 4 Julie London LPS I need to sell, raising cash to buy a new alto sax - so spring for it - I want to sell the lot of 4 LPs together and they are in varying condition - but hey, Bobby Troup liked her and so will you: All Through the Night - w/Bud Shank Quartet - decent shape, scuffs. Liberty. G- Sophisticated Lady - lots of marks. Liberty. Julie London - Guest Star records - weird label, record is vg++, plays well Love On the Rocks. Liberty. VG++ I'll sell the 4 of 'em for $24 shipped priority in the USA. Otherwise they become coasters. email me at alowe@maine.rr.com I would like to do paypal: my address: alowe@maine.rr.com

well, nobody seems to give a shit so I'll repeat - listen to the drums - Doc West as it turns out (who, to further prove my point, is with Bird later on some Dial sessions) -

at least he wasn't chained to the bottom of the ocean -

the scary thing is not that there's so much good stuff that he doesn't know about, but that he doesn't KNOW he doesn't know about the good stuff - incredibly stupid for someone in his position -

thanks - there's a little more to go but I'm optimistic about this one - I've been up in the boonies (Maine) a little too long, so it was nice to work with such world-class musicians. There'll be a few surprises, I think -

I agree in almost ever aspect of that - the only thing I would add is that every great musician I have known appeared to me to operate, in terms of initial inspiration, from a part of the self that was not socially defined but more from a very deep and complicated but inter-connected series of intellectual/intuitive impulses - I believe that that is where it starts - once it surfaces, however, social context immediately mixes and interacts - of course, all of this is like trying to separate intellect and emotion, idea and feeling, etc etc, a largely futile exercise in which we (meaning I) end up trying to prove the unproveable, which is where creativity comes from-

unless I get a call from Chuck Nessa I'll probably put it out myself - it's interesting, though not surprising - - of the 6 CDs I've put out prior to this, three were on regular labels, three I put out myself - and I always made more money on the ones I financed - has to do with some sleazy European publishing deal and the general accounting practices of even small independent labels -

I agree that the end result may certainly have been to develop a musical form, bebop, whose origins were uncontestably African American (as earlier jazz was) - I just think that the imperative to create this was artistic and not racial/social -

just came back from NYC on Tuesday night, having finished a recording session in Brooklyn on 4/17 with Matt Shipp, Randy Sandke and Scott Robinson, and am quite happy with the results - I haven't set foot in a studio in about 12 years, and I'm working on a complicated new project for which I'm playing alto and guitar. Shipp did two solo piano pieces that I'd written, and we did a guitar/piano duo of an 8 bar blues. Matt is a sweetheart and a brilliant musician; it was the first time we'd met in person (we've been talking on the phone about the project for about 4 months); it was my recording debut on guitar so I was nervous but it went well. I than did a trio with Sandke and Robinson; Scott played the bass parts on contra bass clarinet - we did two tunes I'd written, one based on the changes to I'm Coming Virginia, the other based on Yardbird Suite - I played alto on these - and I want to praise Randy as one of the giants, an amazing soloist and the nicest guy on earth - and Scott was brilliant if a little cranky (he came back from Moscow the day before; and is still recovering from a broken leg) - I'm going down again to NYC to record with Marc Ribot on 5/15 and will probably do the final recordings back in Maine at the end of May with my local group - should also mention that we recorded at Systems Two in Brooklyn; great sounding room, nice people, excellent engineer (Richard Lamb) -

I don't doubt that African Americans (musicians and non-musicians) had an active consciousness of racial issues and of being exploited/cheated by whites - I just do not believe all of ML Williams statements - they are just too prescient, too prophetic, she is just always in the right place at the right time, steering the music and musicians in historically correct directions. It's just too convenient. And I do not think musicians were, at the time, making any kind of conscious social statement, though one can, certainly, in retrospect, see the social connections (on the other hand one might make the argument that artistic changes/modernist movements ARE social movements, though in a different way than Deveaux represents). The truth is that we have no primary-source proof of these intentions, and people like Max Roach spoke of the idea of taking back the music too many years later for us to know the veracity of the statements - and, as I said, they were too couched in post-1960s rhetoric for me to believe them -

exactly - though I would be a bit skeptical of that ML Williams quote - much as I admire her, her own historical recountings are fraught with "I was there" as the music went through cataclysmic changes. Still, one never knows...