Simon Weil

I posted this back in May, and it's what I still feel as I re-read the book. What I plan to do now is immerse myself after re-reading Gennari in a big stewpot of New Jazz Studies stuff (BTW, that is what the NJS folks call themselves) to make sure that I'm right in thinking that Gennari is, as I think he is, reading the history of jazz criticism so that the NJS approach is both the cure and the culmination. Another aspect of the book that drives me crazy and that is connected to what I've already said is the way it blithely (or so it seems, but it isn't really blithe at all) takes chunks of the past that you have direct experience of and transforms them into things that are quite distant from and alien to what you and others actually experienced. [as though] the room they checked in to isn't there, there's no door for it, the wife and daughter have vanished, the people at the hotel say they've never seen the man or his wife and daughter before, and the page in the hotel register where the man signed his name doesn't exist. "It Was. But It Ain't." -- to borrow the title of the Charles Olson essay that zeroes on on this evil semi-intellectual con game. First off, forgive me for chopping out the setting for your parallel. I feel it allows me to see more clearly. I just feel you're going to have an awful lot of evidence before you accuse someone of doing evil - especially when you've been online and accused him in this direct way. He can just come right back at you, if he has right of reply. The other thing is this comes across as a bit of a zero-sum game. The whole thing about the deconstructive approach is it works best (and usefully) if you can absorb its insights into a larger frame. Of course you may feel Gennari doesn't have any insights - in which case I guess it would be a game to reduce Jazz history to some arbitrary glop. The only meaning being that he gets to define what the glop is. But if that really is the case, you should be able to find hard evidence. Or anyone someone should. If it's that bad, you could probably deconstruct the text and come up with stuff. But does anyone really want to read a deconstruction of a book deconstructing Jazz history? I think you might be better of demonstrating skewed scholarship. Simon Weil

any chance you could post it here? Well...There's a whole thing to do with copyright. I know Val got pretty peeved with the online Ayler biog because it used great chunks of her stuff (also without attribution). So, it's probably best to leave it. I mean if you do all that work... Simon Weil

I remember a gig he did with Old and New Dreams at the Lyric Hammersmith in London. Maybe it was the end of the 70s. A gig sparked by Ed Blackwell, eventually. The whole band seem to take off and go to another place. Ian Dury (the disabled pop star) was in the audience. All these (named) guys are now gone. It really gets to me, his passing. Simon Weil

The myth of this article is nothing "succeeds like success". AKA, you need success to keep going. If that were true there'd be no Jazz, product of rejects of society. Therefore Wynton is antithetical to the spirit that both created Jazz and ensured its continuing vitality. I really dig the management speak. Simon Weil

Well, for the most part, they don't really do a very good job. And the writing exercises they conduct get a little old.... For the best writers, these "exercises" are analogous to working through a solo or a composition for a musician. Writing is an art form itself, a difficult one, and just because it takes music criticism as its jumping-off point does not mean it isn't valid on its own terms. There are bad writers out there just like there are bad painters and bad musicians, but hopefully with time, those writers will become very, very good or even great. I think you're right about reviewers loving music and wanting to be part of the community. I also think you're right that they indulge in writing exercises in the hope of getting better. The trouble is this rather misses the point. Are the reviewers any good at their core enterprise, that is judging music and presenting that judgement to the public? No. There needs to be a kind of solidity at the core of a good critic. I mean he needs to be clued into what he's listening to and get it right for the public. It's that discipline - of getting it right for the public - which differentiates a critic from someone who just wants to be part of the community, in my opinion. I think there's some self-criticism in there - like "Am I getting it right?" is the core question. The wanting to be part of the community is more about "Do they like me?" - personal validation. The critic (theoretically) serves the community; the wannabee reviewer looks for the community to validate, serve, him. See everyone wants to be part. Simon Weil

I'm more of a culture guy than a politics one, but maybe the right way to look at the Bird with Strings is to say he was looking to up his/Jazz's cultural credibility - move into a zone carrying greater cultural capital (rather than economic capital) with the Strings. Because strings were associated with Classical music which was an accepted "high" art form - as Jazz wasn't at the time. Things like wearing suits (the MJQ) and playing in concert halls, calling tunes "La Ronde" relate to that too. 50 years later the boot is on the other foot, with Jazz carring considerable cultural capital. So you get people like Kenny G who call their music "smooth jazz" rather than instrumental pop, because the term "jazz" carries with it some connotations of a cut above in popular culture - and sell records on the back of it. Jazz today benefits from its cultural cred in the form of commercial sponsorships. But there's also the question of it's cultural credibility per se drawing listeners: "Look what a cultured guy I am, I listen to jazz" AKA "I'm special". Simon Weil

Happy birthday Kenny. Simon Weil

No info, but I miss her. Simon Weil

I got to this point and I couldn't read on.: Ah, glib. It's like a million of these articles you read, where the guy's got the gig, is not up to it and has to blather. I recommended Point of Departure to a neophyte (Classical lover, likes Brad Meldau not Miles) recently. Simon Weil [Edit] I think what might be irksome is that it's patronising. I'm seeing quite a few of these articles, where the guy essentially says "because I don't get it, there's nothing to get". These articles don't serve Jazz well, tending to remove credibility from the form as a whole.

My copy arrived today ... and taking some valuable time away from my own writing chores, I gave it a quick once-over. The book is very "user-friendly" and handsomely produced -- lots of pictues and illustrative material (notes, album covers, lead sheets, etc.) that interests the historian in me. It does not contain the kind of in-depth analysis of the music that some might wish for, but as an institutional history I think that Kahn has, once again, performed yeoman service. I have found his previous books to be very insightful, and his comments on NPR always capture my interest, even when he is dealing with more pop subjects. Well, I think the intent of his previous books was more or less "pure enjoyment for your average Jazz listener". There's no edge to these books - which there was to the original albums. Celebratory. Simon Weil

Well, I agree. But, if you go with someone like Wynton Marsalis it is very much a masculine music. He never comes right out and says it, but it's there in his actions and in between the lines. This is one of those places where energy and creativity can be blocked simply because the people at the top won't/can't/don't know how to listen. I have an article coming on WM and women, so it's on my mind. Simon Weil

Which audience? The audience who's only/mostly interested in reissues and/or retreads? I'd say that that audience is pretty much already connected. It's a small one, but hell, what do you expect? The audience who wants to hear challenging new music that doesn't replicate the old? There's an audience for that, even if it is smallish and fragmented, but everytime you call most of that music "jazz", cries of righteous indignation are heard across the Land Of The Guardians. The audience who wants to hear entertaining instrumental music that's not too unfamiliar/complicated/confrontational? That type of jazz is already pretty well connected with its audience, be it Smooth or Jam or whatever. The audience who wants jazz to serve in the role of Official American Cultural Triumph? Again, connected. Lincoln Center's doing good business. Jazz as we've known and loved it is pretty much dead as a vibrant musical form of today. Evolution works. But jazz as a mindset/spiritual vibe will never die. Hell, it existed before jazz as a musical form ever did, and it lives on today. It's the jazz audience that needs to reconnect with today, not jazz music with its audience. I could someday maybe even be persuaded under the right circumstances to say that it's the audience that's killing the music, not the other way around. Do we want our children to know and appreciate the great musical and spiritual legacy of jazz? Damn straight we do. But what do we want them to do with that knowledge and appreciation? Regurgitate it in perpetuity, or do something of their own with it? We say that we want the latter, but then too often recoil in horror when the results aren't comfortably similar to what's gone before. Bodies dying is natural and healthy. Spirits dying isn't. Well, actually I meant something quite simple. I intuit that there are enough people out there who would connect up with Jazz if we offered it to them in the right way to make a renewed audience. I have RSI and I go to a massage lady who normally plays New Age while she does her stuff. One day I was going on about Albert Ayler and she suddenly said bring some in. So I did, thinking , well she can take it off after ten seconds. Except she didn't, she listened to the whole thing, CD2 of Live in Greenwich Village. She loved the stuff, was going on about how it expressed life and was full of pent up emotion -and ended up by dancing around to it. And this is from someone who would normally be playing New Age, which is pretty much as far as you can get from Ayler. So... For a long time (ca 5 years) I've intuited that this stuff, the intense emotionally charged, life-derived music that Ayler exemplifies is just what this repressed, oppressed age needs. Only, we in Jazz are so bloody scared of being called primitivists if we vote for it, that no-one (or barely anyone) will try and play it/market it to the wider audience. Well, yes, one swallow doesn't make a summer, but that's still what I think. Let's have some life. Simon Weil

I think "diversification" and "left-field" are the two key terms here. Blue Note is trying to stay afloat by "diversifying" by introducing artists that can make money, yet are still distinctive (read "left-field") in the way Jazz ain't. That is Jazz is distinctive but doesn't make money. What we need is a form of Jazz that reconnects it with its audience. Simon Weil

Yeah, that's a rather infamous quote. I mean, I love the culture of the 1930s popular front, but it did include some pretty condescending attitudes, as demonstrated above. The whole Marxist/CPUSA hate/love affair with jazz is something that might be worthy of a longish article by someone, at some point (might have been done already, for all I know). By the late 1930s they generally embraced swing with enthusiasm (pretty much sponsored From Spirituals to Swing via the New Masses), but early on jazz was dismissed as either decadent or bourgeois music. For me, the real problem with this stuff is getting enough critical distance to assess it properly. I mean the whole thing is pervaded with racial issues which implies degrees of anger hard to keep at bay. I personally am scared of going there, if only because of the anger that persists there now. It's a judgemental thing and I don't have it. Pity. Simon Weil

Well, you could try writing it "in the style of" all the people you wish you could have got to do it (all the time explaining that, in fact, you don't have the money, and as Jim kind of said, keeping your tongue firmly in your cheek) - plus, then, to "balance" you could have all (or let's say, some of) the people you are glad can't. "I was going to contract out for it but am running out of money" is kind of lopsided-funny. Simon Weil

Well, the Settin the Pace notes has the guy (effectively) state he's Jewish at the top - and saying he was drugged out on lack of sleep. So then he's writing his thing as an evocation of a drugged out Jew's experience - i.e. his. What I don't see is why you say "sounds like". I mean, is there something specifically "Jewish" in the way those notes were written. Is this like the blindfold test where people affirm they could tell the difference between black and white players? Or perhaps you meant something different. Simon Weil (My subject)

Still, over 15 years since I took that class, I marvel at the quote above. It is real, I assure you. Our own Spontoonious has seen the book with his own two eyes, and can verify its authenticity. Read it again. This was the book every student who took "Western Music History 101" got to read. I stand before you, dumbfounded. (And, strangely enough, the passage does read much like album liner-notes often do, doncha think?? The rest of the book isn't nearly as bad as this one passage (how could it be??) -- but the passage above is real, and really does kick off nearly 11 pages about Wagner's place in music history.) Well, Wagner is kind of a religion to many Wagnerians. It is kind of Crouch-like in its "elevation". Wagner is v. important in Modern art, so it's kind of defensible, the quote. The style is out of the Wagner as God school, which isn't defensible unless you're a Wagnerian. Simon Weil [You should check Norman Lebrecht on Jazz]

The Solo Sessions are tremendous - but the're also kind of unbearable - he's so naked, like Martin Williams says in the sleevenotes, it seems an unfair intrusion to listen to them. There is something very self-destructive about Evans - and, for me, all the discussions about drugs or narcissism are subsumed into that. It seems like he was almost the classic melancholic and lived his life out of that. I mean those last Village Vanguard sessions are so sort of expansive, and yet he's dying. Like the time he gets to spread his wings is when he's got no more time. There is a big connection between melancholia and depth of thought in the Western cultural tradition, and Evans seems to fit into that. He's a tremendous fit on Kind of Blue, where he infuses the blues of the album with a kind of melancholic vibe. There's a kind of blackness to the thing. Anyhow that's how it seems to me. I think there is a kind of blackness to Evans, to put it another way. Simon Weil

Well, to judge him on the basis of his Albert Ayler article (available in chopped form online) - really, this is pretty insightful. AND he gets Ayler to talk intellectually (just about the only guy to, in my estimation). YES, it isn't the whole story. And, when he gets down to talking about Ayler in his VV sleevenotes, it's such an exceptionally chopped form of his original interview, that you'd be forgiven for thinking that Hentoff was really struggling. I like "Jazz Is" and, really, like Hentoff. But, if you take another (famous) example the idea of Coltrane and Sanders "speaking in tongues" (from the sleevenotes to Meditations), I just think he gets that wrong - and says it with such conviction that that's what everyone remembers. Or then again he does get Coltrane to reveal important conceptual stuff in those same notes. I guess sleevenotes are complex things and reveal (or can reveal) multiple sides. (Yours patronisingly....) Simon Weil

Wow! S'wonderful criticism. Thankyou, Larry. Simon Weil (I mean there's a million things you could say, but I couldn't just now= Gobsmacked.)

Oh well, if we're going to go there, I think his "poem" to "The Majesty of the Blues" must be mentioned. I mean, it does make me laugh out loud. Irony-free. Gawd, a school of Crouch... Simon Weil

Well, I agree with Larry in (really) disliking the whole idea of critics shaping the music. Mostly, it seems to go against common sense - in that Musicians make the music first. After that the critics speak. So it's ex post facto, their effect. OK, you can say that critics direct the attention of audiences, but I give people more credit than that. And particularly Jazz people. Anyone here knows just how little attention critics get as decisive influences on our listening these days. Witness the thousand and one examples of people saying they'd rather come here than listen to what a critic has to say. And I just refuse to believe that is entirely new. Jazz has a particularly intelligent as sussed audience and has a history of that. My reading is there's a degree of wish-fulfilment in the idea of critics shaping the music (or any other art). I mean (some) critics would like that power because, well, power is a buzz. OK, here's a theory: But then they find they can't do it and get pissed off because no-one's taking a blind bit of notice. So they go back in the past, where they assert that critics did have the power. And in a kind of fit of pique and frustration they assert that these particular critics used their influence malignantly which kind of assuages their inability to do anything. I can think of examples. I think the most important critic these days is Wynton Marsalis - and he's the most important critic because he's a musician and infuses his critical ideas (which are BS) with his standing as a symbolic player in Jazz. Musicians cannot be unbiased observers and his usurpation of the critics role is backed by a version of this "critics have used their influence malignantly" line - a line, which, as I have indicated, I believe to be hollow. Of course, your occasional critic might make a difference. Simon Weil

This thread has a bit of "The Sidewinder" about it. Simon Weil [Added 16th May: It's got too many people getting in their licks to prosper, in my opinion.]

... The thing I think about here is how close this argument is to the one used by the film industry - where the threat is (illegal) downloading and video-piracy. They do these desperately hipper-than-thou adverts which you have to watch because they've stuck them at the beginning of DVDs. This is in the UK... They used to do this advert which said video-piracy funds organised crime and...terrorism. At the word "terrorism" my heart just revolted. I mean, OK, the film industry doesn't want us going to external sources to get its movies - but using "terrorism" as a threat....I just hated it. And it shows how desperate these big companies are to prevent an erosion of control of their product. Thus, behind this argument, as used by Koester - a small retailer - there is a very self-serving argument proseletyzed (sp?) by the big companies. They obviously dread the hipness of alternative sources of supply. Simon Weil

Re: independent record stores, wouldn't online ordering also account for a big drop in these shops' business? I think it's more that anything off the beaten track has trouble these days. I mean Koester says as much when he says that his label is 50% off because it's not distributed by a major. My impression is that more and more these days "big is boss" in both the sense that big chains or big distributors determine what reaches the public - and what these big bosses are into is things that will make the bottom line bigger. That's the supply side, which is conservative - restricted to the big sellers. But I think there's also a demand side, which is also conservative. Like I've said before, this is a pretty hyper-conservative age - and I think that's fed into people* wanting (Or more correctly, not wanting) Jazz (or anything else "different"). Maybe the supply side is a rationalisation of the demand side. I've always thought (for 4+ years) that this hyper-conservative age is the last kick of the Reagan-Thatcher era - Basically attempting to crush out everything that, when it's gone, can form the beginnings of the Liberal era that's would follow. If that's so, Jazz will again have the chance of being popular; big will become less beautiful - and we might see some interesting stuff. My myth... Simon Weil *Just the core audience.