AllenLowe

Pete Cosey - and Billy Butler -

Part 2 - as Larry says there are problems - some involve the issue of whether free playing has created its own cliches and conventions, which I think can be true to some extent. I have no absolute problems with the formalists I mentioned previously - I believe that form is the issue we must grapple with - except that they too often confuse gimmick with idea, mannerism with style. I tend to think that the solutions are rather classic - that the best music comes from a seamless integration of composition and improv, from a continuity between the two. It is for this reason that I've become so impatient with contemporary playing that makes such a decisive cut between the two (the old string-of-solos problem).

Yes, I don't mean to tar everyone with the same brush and there are many players whose concepts of "free" improvising" I find challenging and fresh - heard Joe McPhee a few years ago up here, and he was great. Also, I have played on the same bandstand as Roswell Rudd and Julius Hemphill, and words cannot describe the way in which the stage (and the band) seemed to levitate. There was a pianist I worked with from Vermont a few years back, Andy Shapiro, one of the greatest free players I've ever known or worked with, and a great human being, but he's dead now, recorded on one CD with me, though I regret never putting together a full-scale project for him. The great improviser creates his own structural logic, whether it's based on chords or scales or not. I am admittedly weak on current players, being out of the loop up here in Maine, but heard Matt Wilson's group a few years ago and was impressed though I feel they made their point early and went on a bit too long. Also have gotten a bit tired of the freeing-up-the-classics thing; feel like I've been there and done that, and even find (and I'm in a minority on this) groups like Dead Cat Bounce a little tiresome, as great as they play. And I'm particularly jaded by one guitarist whom I used to know and who is a one-trick pony and can really play very little but who has turned his small and only occasionally interesting ideas into a kind of new-music legend. The guy can not really play, and the critics adore him and it does get to me now and than. It certainly is a bit harder for many people to judge performers who work in more open forms, but there are enough people around with a sense of perspective and history to at least guide us into some relatively uncharted territory.

come on Chuck, who's the collector with the 6 minutes - so we can sneak over to his house in the middle of the night and beat the crap out of him and grab the 6 minutes - or at least have pizzas delivered until he relents -

There's room for a very broad discussion on post-free players who still play in open formats. I must admit I've become a bit bored with the scene - and feel like there is a whole generation of formalists who've arisen and whose music is faithfully covered in poublications like Signals to Noise and The Wire - both of which I read and like, but both of which reflect too many musicians who can talk the talk but not much else. By formalism I mean that they've embraced the idea of formal innovation without coming to grips with the need to rejuvenate the music structural, technically, and through its content. I've just been disappointed too many times, after reading an intelliigent interview and than rushing to the web site to hear just one more sonic illustration of what was current 40 years ago -

interesting title, particulary as Julius Hemphill once attacked Marsalis as "tilling the master's fields."

...I didn't even know she was sick...

How about Billy Butler?

Oscar Moore made a very nice album with the pianist Carl Perkins -

I may be dogmatic on this - but if it sounded good with the speakers in different rooms, and if it sounds good in isolation, than it will sound BETTER when everything is together and recorded "live" - ever wonder, for example, why the best jazz recordings (and this ain't just deluded nostalgia) happened in the 1950s and 1960s? Well, that's how they were recorded, "live" and together. Think about it. I feel strongly about this and don't mean to piss anybody off -

Alll excellent; Hadlocks Jazz Masters of the Twenties probably the best. The 1930s - Rex Stewart - fascinating first-person perspective. 40's - Gitler - essential, though a lot of the best work in that book is straight transcriptions of interviews (Dick Katz, in particular, should probably have been named co-author). 50s - very good as well.

Yes, Hank Garland - and Jimmy Bryant, another ocuntry/jazz crossover - and let's not forget Glen Campbell, a great guitarist -

overdubbing is a problem - in the few instances where I wanted to do something about a bad or sloppy passage, what I did was re-record the section at the right tempo and edit it in - this can be tricky, but ok if done right -

funny this should come up here, as I am currently working on the liner notes for my next CD - I asked a writer I know to do it, and he had a little trouble "getting" the CD, so it means I'm doing it myself - fun to do, but VERY HARD to write about your own music - unless you're Mingus -

you're absolutely right - everybody wants to be able to fix everything today, to overdub -

just to add, I agree with Chuck that in certain cases "natural" sound is irrelevant - but in this I would tend to refer to projects that are more electronic, in which the recorded object is itself the artistic point, either electronically or through some other means. Look at Brian Wilson's amazing work, in which the layers of sound are specifically intended to evoke a certain feeling that has nothing to do with the group in its natural habitat. This could not have been done "live" -

I agree about this problem being an old one - and isolation and dead rooms may not be the same problem, but they frequently are part of the same problem. More and more engineers seem to be trying to deaden acoustics in order to have more freedom to play with the music afterwards - and this, today, amounts to acoustic modeling. In the old days it amounted to modeling by plate reverb, or whatever was used. Isolation, even in a good sounding environment, is a problem, in my opinion - the complete acoustic separation of instruments is why so many multi-track recordings sound so bad - each instrument exists in some weird kind of acoustically separate space, and no amount of good mixing can make it sound natural - for this you need bleed. I recently did a "live" multi-track of my own group with total bleed between tracks - I was able to have the flexibility to mix levels, but it still sounded like a real group playing together in a real room. About ten years ago I used the same technique to record Roswell Rudd with my group - and Roswell, who has done a lot of recording, but is very difficult to capture, told me it was the best that his sound has ever been recorded - (it also helped that I used no cpmpression or limiting, as this is often done with him as well) -

well, I've been on all sides of this one, and have recorded, and engineered recordings, in all formats. I do believe that, as Mike has said, with the right mikes, a good room, and a smart engineer (and no compression, but that's just my thing) you can make digital recordings that rival good analog. A bigger problem these days is isolation and what amounts to digital modeling of all instruments - if you record close-microphoned in a dead room than you will have to create all acoustic properties in the board, an unfortunate thing that will NOT make it sound natural. I have recently done some a-b'ing with a good multi-track tape machine and a direct-to-disc machine (at 16/44), with great monitors, and was truly hard-pressed to tell the difference. Now, give me two-inch with Dolby S, and THAN we can talk, as I am certain that would be noticeably better. But there is a gigantic grey area for musicians like myself, who need to make high quality recordings, are too old to deal with tape, and whose ears accept the very nice, if not perfect, digital results.

Actually, though they are rarely readable before buying the CD, I think notes have actually improved in the world of compact discs - the booklets allow much more space, and if the writer is good, they can be quite illuminating, especially, but not only, with boxed sets - of course, this also gives bad writers more space -

Jabbo Smith had the most beautiful singing voice I ever heard -

It's kind of a silly auction - magazines that the daughter of Lester Young owned that are not worth anywhere near what she expects - unless Prez breathed on them, maybe - or unless they can lift some of his fingerprints off of them -

Somebody mentioned Gregory's in NYC - I went there constantly in the 1970s when Al Haig had a trio there - with Jamil Nasser and first Chuck Wayne and than later Al Gaffa. Wayne and Haig had a major blowout one night as they disagreed on chord changes to some tune - Al was the leader but Chuck got very aggressive, and that was it, the next night Al Gaffa joined the band.

Thanks,Mark - I used to see him regularly when I lived in NY in the 1970s - I even wrote a piece for Downbeat on him, approx. 1976. Nice man as well as a great pianist -

For Bob Mover, get In the True Tradition (Xanadu) if you can find it -

well, maybe I am confusing things - but there's a famous shot in which Maini reveals himself over the bell of his horn (somehow I thought Bruce was involved in this but I'm not certain) -