AllenLowe

Severn Darden! someone called him the greatest comic improviser ever; I remember seeing him in The President's Analyst. he was second city, no?

funny, because Dave Schildkraut always mourned a mouthpiece that someone had worked on and ruined - and I am sure it was the same brand and kind, a Link metal.

well it should be like domain names - first come first served. Snatch 'em up and they are yours. first thing I'm gonna do is grab the rights to Harold Robbins; then Kenny G.

I'll have to read that piece, Larry, but basically he seems to be saying that birds can't read. though given some of the things I've seen parrots do and say, it may be more complex than that.

I knew his wife at the time, so it wasn't completely out of left field; but it threw me.

I have to admit, my mind was quite blown one morning while living in New Haven, maybe '79 or '80; getting a phone call that went: "hi Allen this is Bill Evans. Do you know where I can get some coke?"

just to add, re-some of the above comments on Evans' later state of mind; the last year or two he was miserable and heavily addicted and seemed to be trying to kill himself; he also, in his final descent, refused hospital care.

once again I think there is some confusion - I don't know who Paul thinks would deny Crudup's estate their publishing royalties - which has NOTHING to do with royalties on sales of records made by Crudup himself (who was, btw, a real pioneer; read my book for explanation). and as I said earlier, even PD labels are REQUIRED to pay publishing fees. So no composer is being cheated.

I too was shocked that no one at first realized who he was. Because he was a great drummer, far superior to Ginger Baker.

"I find this comment interesting. If you have no problem acquiring music without paying the artists or their estates or rights holders what is due them, do you have a problem with people acquiring your music without paying you what is due you?" ah, Aggie is back and misses no opportunity to fire some arrows; but, whoa, pardner, you need an industry reality check - first of all, even PD labels are required to pay publishing; as for the musicians, they are not paid session money for reissues unless it's in the contract anyway; you really think the estates are getting anything significant? When Fantasy reissued a few Al Haig things his widow got nothing, and they knew where she was. And those were not boots. but as I said above, I do not believe even leaders are due pay for reissues unless the contract is very specific. As for royalties on sales, good luck, because nobody pays them, legit or not. I am still waiting for Enja to pay me a penny on sales and publishing for the thing I did for them in the '90s. and yes I do like to get paid for my music, but I won't be worried about this when I am 90, as I do believe in the 50-year rule. So set your alarm clock, Aggie, for 2044.

if a major does it right I will buy it; if an independent does it right I will buy it. Without this approach we would know about 20 percent of the history of American popular music of all genres.

when it's bad, it's really hard to get rid of. maybe more like a rash.

I think a good critic is as much an 'artist' as an artist is, and I have learned as much from critics as I have from 'artists.'

I will get that paper, thanks Larry; I also think the general lack of an analytical approach to jazz performance has a very positive side to it, as a last vestige of the oral culture that is at the root of African American performance and hence jazz. The music comes from a very different place than European music, theater and literature. Which is a good thing; I just think that at a certain point it can take the burden of deep analysis.

Sticks Evans? huh; knew his ex-wife back in the '70s, she was friends with Nan Evans, Bill's wife, though no relation to Sticks. Didn't know much about him.

Chuck - I just tend to think that jazz, unlike, say, theater and literature, has a weak and inconsistent intellectual tradition that has fogged a deeper understanding of not only what happens in the music but also why it happens. Sometimes this is for the better, and it has helped the music move on without so much of the academic b.s. and false intellectuality that academia tends to lay on the arts. on the other hand....as a musician I have learned as much from certain critics as I have from other musicians, and it has helped my own music in infinite ways. For example - not only hearing and absorbing Sonny Rollins but the illumination of, for example, some of the things that Larry Kart has written about Sonny. Also, Max Harrison's strange but brilliant writing on Ornette Coleman which is both clarifying and just plain wrong, I think, but in ways which clarify even further. John Szwed's writing about Sun Ra and Ellington has explained the whole line of Diasporic cultural influence; and this not only gave me a lot of new ideas but helped me absorb older but important aspects of the music. Larry Gushee's work on not only JR Morton but on various origin theories of jazz were equally inspiring; and Mulatto Radio is filled with songs that were built on associations between my own musical proclivities and intellectual ideas absorbed from Gushee, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others. And I can't even begin to grasp Dave Schildkraut's somewhat bizarre ideas of Jewish Mysticism. But somehow it was connected with the rides he took in alien spaceships. But Sun Ra would have understood. and that is just for a start.

it's not laying on labels, Paul, it is trying to come to grips with questions that are really essential; and I'm not a critic, after about 12 cds of my own work (not that there's anything wrong with it....) I actually think that one of the reasons jazz fails so regularly is because of this kind of anti-intellectualism; it has stripped a lot of the music of a deeper intellectual rationale.

let me add that I feel no guilt in buying any of this stuff because I have supported this industry with a LOT of my semi-hard-earned dollars since 1968. The record/cd business received more of my cash than anything, other than my kids.

personally I am likely not a post-modernist by the ICP definition; my interest in these forms is not for distancing or irony; I guess I would just suggest people listen to Mulatto Radio, as I think our take on this sort of practice is unique.

it's the use of irony, I think, that sticks in the craw. It's not just in jazz; I think through the last 30 years or so of certain modern singers who have adapted to country music, but in a way that is just too much of a parody and too contemptuous for my tastes.

the problem, however, with the Kind of Blue project is that they have not found a way to occupy that piece with a style that makes all their efforts worthwhile. Instead of Duchamp-ian commentary it comes off as Fraternity Prank. At least to me.

I agree; I think the main thing I was grappling with was whether one could use classic musical strategies while still maintaining an edge, or whether such use simply consigns one to the toilet bowl of history. Which for me is really a matter of self justification. But you are right in that typical post-modernism is overly self-conscious, whereas more interesting work - like Berman's - just gets to where it gets because it has to. though maybe I am creating a new category of post-modernist, as one who simply lives as much of it as he can - instead of selecting certain aspects of 'tradition' - and then lets it come out as whatever it comes out as. But whose condition is unique in terms of aesthetic range of choices.

I've always had a different take on post modernism than the commonly held definitions, which seems to put it in the space of cultural neo-conservatism, a huddling with the old ways of doing things, representing a particular manifestation of a fear of modernity, of being lost in an artistic world in which standards appear to be lost. This is kind of the Terry Teachout position, a desperation to rescue the old values from the barbarians at the cultural gate. It applies to Marsalis and Crouch, of course, as well. My own belief is that post-modernism is simply the condition of the contemporary artist who has lived either physically or imaginatively through the progressions of representational and non-representational expression; and who finds him or her self in a place populated (well, really crowded) with so much choice, so many potential directions, that reality often becomes a matter of synthesis - sometimes conscious and sometimes not. But then I worried whether my own proclivities - decidedly tonal, somewhat conservative in a radically excepting way - were too conservative, or even reactionary. This all came to me as I answered some questions recently put to me by someone writing a paper, who asked me if I believed in the concept of authenticity. I replied: "There is such a thing as authenticity; which really, in my own tastes and preferences, relates to things that reflect a real and un-mediated response to life (as opposed to art that seems to first take a market survey before deciding what to do or sell). It is authentic if it is a product of need and if it is as first-hand a form of expression as possible – it needs to lead from some immediate condition of the artist’s consciousness, it must avoid the use of pre-digested expression, gestures which do not come from the artist’s personal consciousness but which rather derive from some second-hand absorption of a third-party’s work or opinions or image. Robbe Grillet spoke about the need to avoid metaphor because he saw the use of metaphor as a means of putting an object between the mind and the action, and in doing so filtering out the deeper realities of experience. I agree completely, which is why I hate clichés of language and music, because they tend to be used as points of shallow identification, in ways which allow the artist (and also the audience, but the artist has to come first here) to avoid looking at things with a fresh eye and ear. Now, even within this somewhat radical idea of creation I still love the older musical arts and am not opposed to harmony and tonality and other kinds of post-representational reality. I see the beauty in preservation through a new lens, because revolutions themselves usually end up as means of enforcing newer kinds of conformity; but that’s another subject." and so it occurred to me that, though our ears tell us, repeatedly, otherwise, it is possible, in jazz and improvised music, to produce fresh work which is tonal, representational, and harmonically based. Not long ago I discussed with a member of this group (to beat a dead horse, at least on this forum) how offensively bad some of W. Marsalis' composing is. Because listening to music as lifeless as I heard one night on a net broadcast of JALC paralyzes me. It's like seeing a bad movie or a bad play, or reading a bad novel - it seems (at least to my frozen mind) to induce hopelessness that anything, in the wake of this bad, bad work, can succeed as music or writing or acting. But then, of course, there are the common jazz rescue points - Mingus, Bud Powell, Bird, Monk. Followed by the usual discouragement at how even these beacons of light have been misused, as artistic ends rather than means. Which just leads me, immediately, right back to the piano to see if the first thought, as Kerouac and Ginsberg said, really is the best. Which it often is not. Though more often than not it is the necessary first step, the shortest line between those two points which both begin and conclude the inevitable, and next, sounds.

I use mine for unauthorized surgeries.

1) I have a whole bunch of the above; 90 percent are in very good sound - meaning, when they could, they just made a clone of CDs that were available - there is one of two that really suck but most that I have heard are good. 2) there is another label doing same with Giuffre and some others -- the ones I've heard are major crap-ups of good original sound; I don't know if they were working from LPs or what, but they did something. Could even be bad converters; most of the Giuffre is horrible. all of this makes you appreciate Fresh Sound, which usually gets it right, sonically speaking. but all in all they often pull in things you CANNOT get anywhere else. I especially have needed these, as I am trying to finish my book on '50s jazz.