AllenLowe

ahh, married, middle aged and overweight - now there's a context I can understand -

Dr. Rat - to answer your question: here's a few contextualizers with limited understanding of the actual music - and give me time and I'll get some more - Burton Peretti; Lewis Erenberg; Beebee Garafolo (might have the spelling wrong); Jeffrey Melnick; William Kenney; Cathy Ogren; Robin Kelley (not the singer, the guy at Columbia U) -

the only problem with the Rounder is that they have edited out, as I recall, most of the interviews - there are old Swaggie LPS, but they are probably pretty pricey by now -

and whatever happened to Chuck Nessa? I heard he was posting under the name Che-

my other problem (and this is NOT related to anything you guys have said) is that blues has become something of an ideology for the Wynton Marsalis's and Stanley Crouch's of the world, and sometimes I want to grab them by the scruff of the neck (not a good idea with Crouch, by the way) and tell them that the heritage of which they speak so fondly is much more complicated -

on the other hand - I was thinking about this last night just before I fell asleep - many people call Kenny G jazz; would we accept that designation just because so many people use it as part of their own musical points of view and just because it has its own sociological justification? I'm not so sure we can really accept it without some challenge -

well, you caught me at a tired moment and I wanted to appear to be gracious - your points are well taken, it's just that I've spent a lot of time listening and studying this stuff and you're right, in common usage people have different ideas of what it is and what it isn't. It's just that once you look at this incredible universe of black music it's so damned complicated and multi-layered. My arguments are not with audiences but with academics who have created these very convenient categories and who have spent so much time "contextualizing" that they never really listen to the music. Fortunately there are people like yourself who actually have real-life experience with the music and I have no real argument with your perspective.

Exultation with Frank Strozier is another great album - and whoever said Ervin has only two solos ain't really listening. I knew Barron when he was up at Wesleyan and when I told him how well I thought he held his own on the Savoy date with Booker he was quite flattered - but that is some great album -

all right, you win -

he's no Martin Denny -

well, you guys have got me interested - just ordered it from Amazon -

he uses a short scale guitar -

well, Chico Marx used to practice piano by soaking his hands in warm water - and that was it. But he was too busy gambling and womanizing - I've been teaching (or trying to teach) myelf guitar (from saxophone previously) over the last 4 years - I find myself just playing - trying to invent, to play lines, to avoid patterns, to learn to always find a tonality no matter where it falls on the neck, to be able to start from any position on the fretboard and construct a scale or line. To play chromatics, to be able to jump intervals, to play anywhere necessary to vary texture and sound. To, really, try to play something fresh and to avoid cliches and to try and get in an out of chords and scales. Don't know if this is orthodox but it seems to work well for me -

Davis - I have often cited Van Der Merwe's book in the past, but not long ago someone on the Jazz Research line gave it something of a skewering - can you elaborate on your feeling about the book? Thanks -

I'd invite more of you over, but I already have a low supply of silverware -

b3 - yes, there were uncomfortable moments in that thread, but I'm sure I was as responsible as you were - things get tense in the heat of the moment, and there is something interesting and confusing about everyone posting at the same time, chronologies changing, and edits going on that change the post you may be responding to (I edit like crazy and would NEVER change a response to make someone else look bad, though I was accused of this once; the accuser and I have since made up, however). I have strong opinions, I know, and sometimes something typed in the isolation of a home office can come out differently than intended. I know that THIS thread will make me think twice about the TONE of what I post (sadly, I may have to stop making Nazi jokes; such is the legacy of the Producers). I will also let Martin Denny rest in peace, the poor guy has suffered enough (and I also have some regrets about the Leslie Gourse thread).

interesting about the baby Dodds, and I'd like to hear the exact words he used - (I have the autobiography and will have to take a look if I can find it) but it's certainly quite possible that he heard the blues around that time. That still, however, does not tell us where they came from, and in the absence of real documentation (this intereview was, after all, done well after the fact) we cannot really judge. This "musical language" you refer to, however, was not necessarily the blues (once again we may be confusing cause and effect) and people were likely to use the term "blues" to describe the modern gospel singers because they had no other frame of reference. And if, indeed, blues WAS played by those jazz groups near the turn of the century, well, this gives increased credibility to my theory that the blues was a commercial codification and consolidation of older black musical forms. There is, apparently, old sheet music (from the 19th century) which does contain the 12 bar blues format (there is a professor, Peter Muir, who is currently doing research on the professional songwriter and the development of the blues). It is just that we really should not make statements of fact about things for which we do not have the facts. The origins of the blues are really shrouded in mystery and my belief is that those older references you speak of, vital and important as they are, are really pre-blues.

well, Johnny was an OK guy, definitely the last of the Mehegans -

one always get's a little defensive when cited as the example of "what not to do" - but I'm certainly glad to help out on the forum whenever I can. I have found that things I've said in jest have been taken a bit too seriously (probably my fault - I'll have to start using those happy faces). There also may be some generational things going on, and my political refernces may condemn me to geezerhood. In that thread with myself and Joe and b3 we certainly approached meltdown, but I think we basically agreed to disagree, which is definitely the right way to go. But I will say that Sahara's response to my political defense is somewhat symptomatic of our failure to see each other's point of view or to even attempt to do so (I was simply pointing out that politics is fair game for ridicule and satire, I was not playing some Nazi card, whatever that is). This is unfortunate but may be the inevitable result of a free exchange.

uh...Sahara Blue, I think you missed something, oh nasty one. We discussed this - that the Nazi theme was a reference to another forum - but that's ok - go back to sleep -

this is also why it's hopless to try and watch a movie on many stations - I've seen them leave out entire scenes that were essential to the plot, and only the fact that I'd seen the movie before enabled me to understand what the hell was going on -

well, we could make THIS entire thread disappear - or maybe delete every other post - or, even better, I will repeat my idea that everyone in the forum should be allowed to edit anyone else's posts - THAN we'll have some fun -

this is why Citizen Kane was such a major development, I would say as a layman - its editing and pacing seems so radical - though it's not to be confused with the latter-day MTV style of obnoxious movements and closeups ad-nauseum. There's a difference between a use of the camera that gives a sense of real and life-like rhythm and one that just puts everything IN YOUR FACE - another thing that makes older American films so dead is the use of sound stages for nearly everything, and the rare use of outdoor location (and other real location) shooting. I remember seeing an early Renoir film (can't remember the name) and thinking how less-claustrophobic the film felt with its use of real streets and real countryside (even though the film itself was not that good) -

Jim, I agree, and I never intended to give that impression - the reason I make these points is that, historically, a lot of claims are made that can never be substantiated. This may seem like quibbling, but a lot of people (and even scholars) make unsupportable claims for the origins of the blues, and I see the source as being much deeper and broader. By labeling everything as "blues" we tend to give short shrift to all that was going on prior to the blues, to the less formal interactions of black and white musicians, to minstrelsey, to religious music, work songs, field songs, early black popular singing; etc; it's like labeling everything in jazz before 1950 as bebop - there were, as we know, other things that came before the modernists. Some may see these distinctions as nitpicking but they are not, especially as we see pre-bues performers (called songsters by Paul Oliver) who sang a lot more than the blues but whose origins and those of the blues have a lot in common, particularly as they relate to Southern music. There is just another whole world of black song that we miss by calling everything the blues - a lot of early jug music and sanctified song, a great deal of the repertoire of Charlie Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson, the songs of Henry Thomas, hillbilly songs and ragtime/pop tunes. These were folk tunes often altered by pop influence, and sung as traveling entertainments, on streetcorners and at medicine shows. As jazz people (and musicians) we can see the importance of this to jazz, as a great deal of this fed the development of early pop song and hence the jazz musician's original (and developing) repertoire -

and I thought the name Solar referred obliquely (as in Lunar) to How High the Moon which, though on different changes, had similar major/minor transitions -