Simon Weil

Hadlock says you can tell if players come from New Orleans and Louis doesn't agree. At this point, LA's voice changes from the persona he normally presents and it gives a sense of deep and serious - and dark, I'd say.

...."At a retail price of $8,500, the box is not built for the casual collector."....

Some copies available 2nd hand (and relatively cheap) on VHS on Amazon. But also: Jack Johnson Breaking Barriers Documentary This appears to be the full doc (clocks in at just under 90 minutes).

Make sure local people aren't up in arms by employing some. Gets rid of the problem of national names, who use their status to stand up to wider University control (which is probably what this is all about: Academic politics). Reduces the attractiveness of the Jazz programme (per the article).

Ginsberg's Howl is not un-akin to this.

One of my rules of thumb is that the real substance of a post is often the stuff in the brackets.

This is a wonderful piece of "I know I'm right, so I don't have to bother with listening again". You even say it: "I don't want to hear it again."

Miles says this of Bitches Brew: "What we did on Bitches Brew you couldn't ever write down for an orchestra to play. That's why I didn't write it all out, not because I didn't know what I wanted. I knew what I wanted would come out of a process and not some prearranged shit. This session was about improvisation, and that's what makes jazz so fabulous. Any time the weather changes it's going to change your whole attitude about something, and a musician will play differently, especially if everything is not put in front of him. A musician's attitude is the music he plays." Miles/The Autobiography p290 I always read that in the more general sense, of "the way the world is going" for "the weather". Granted this is me extrapolating - and, from that, extrapolating to the way his music changed through out his career, but...

When I was coming up (mid-70s), the 2nd Quintet was the gold standard of what Jazz hipness was about. I didn't understand it, but sensed there was something there. Yup, coming from Rock, I far preferred something I could get my melodic teeth into. But there was no denying it, there was something uncomfortably deep - or perhaps I should say uncomfortable and deep - in this fabulously controlled music on the edge of control. Because that's what it is, this music, terribly dark - It's music where Miles sounds like he's in a world that's heading to Hell - the stuff he did in the 70s ("On the Corner" onwards) is when he gets there - and the way the music is structured evokes that.

His music is indelible.

Gopnik on Camus This is a link to the lecture I talked about. There's a long intro and he only starts talking around 7 and a half minutes in. Skip the intro and then take a look at his eyes while he's delivering this "elevated" discourse. They're horrible.

I don't get The New Yorker and I find very hard to judge from Gopnik's style just whether what he says is true. I don't ever get the sense that he's touched the ground - that is "Right, yes, this here is true and I know it." My impression is he does a variant on Hollywood movie schtick - that is to say he knows how to flatter his audience, in his case would-be intellectuals. Such an audience won't appreciate their hero being attacked, because it hits the facebook generation in its weakest spot, its vanity. He did a lecture on Camus (2013), I watched a bit of (before he did an article for The New Yorker). This is because I was trying to find a subject he engaged with that I had some sort of handle on. I do know that Camus fell out of love with America - because he says so in his American Journals - stating, amongst other things, that "only the Negroes give life, passion and nostalgia to this country". Gopnik doesn't mention this, instead concentrating on how American intellectuals fell in love with Camus and suggesting that this gives them a special insight into the man. Camus, however, doesn't seem to have rated them - and basically got bored. This would be an example of what I generally sense - that Gopnik doesn't touch the ground - in this case, the key fact that Camus fell out of love with the US, preferring to concentrate on American intellectuals falling in love with Camus.

The full title of the book is Stopping Time, Paul Bley and the Transformation of Jazz. In those terms it is disappointing, in that it sets you up to expect some sort of narrative explaining how Jazz changed into what it is now (and I was disappointed by that). Or at least in 1999, when the book was published. But it doesn't deliver that - rather just being Bley's personal story. The likelihood is the publisher thought up the title (Or anyway the second part - it wouldn't be how an author described himself, rather an outsider's point of view) and stuck him with it in order to enhance sales. I actually think the book stands up quite well compared to over-written, over-dramatized Jazz (or music) (auto)-biogs elsewhere. It has more real stuff, somehow. There's quite a lot in it - because Bley did and experienced a lot. Its real value is as testimony - rather than as analysis. It is just him writing about his life, rather than some grandiose narrative explaining how Jazz got to where it is.

Bley says he did a recording with Jimmy Guiffre, Lee Konitz and Bill Connors in 1978, which was his "last audio recording for IAI" - the record label he ran with Carol Goss. After that he stopped running the label, he and Goss got married and moved to upstate New York (80s). He appears in Imagine the Sound (1981). [Info from Stopping Time p129-35]

The point is where one can end up. It can destroy a group.

I'm offended when people try to write what I believe out of History. It's like people trying to say what I've invested chunks of my life in is garbage. Often it's a provocation - designed to draw an "outraged" response.

That's fair enough. But I can't see any particular reason to stick to Larry's train of thought - as defining principle for this thread. I read that bit Larry quoted from Gopnick and was offended by it.

Here's an earlier post of mine: "Popular culture represents what lots of people see as solutions. But such "solutions" can be stop gaps to get them over the moment, cultural ways of "kicking the can down the road". Or they can be true." This is about how people attempt to face (or get out of facing) the challenges of the present (and future). That is it doesn't fit into Magnificent Goldberg's (rewriting of the history of the thread) "Larry's post and subsequent points are all about people rewriting history"

Popular culture presents what lots of people see as solutions. But such "solutions" can be stop-gaps to get them over the moment, cultural ways of "kicking the can down the road". Or they can be true.

There's a tremendous barrage going on at the moment, and one might well deduce that our position is hopeless. But that's not personally the instinct I have about myself. I believe I'm going to get my shot.

You may hate this, but...from Lord of the Rings (the film): Frodo: "I wish none of this had happened." [Picture deleted] Gandalf: "So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides the will of evil." So....

That's not a bad attempt at a review - from the point of the view of an academic constrained by a powerful public acceptance of the thing and his lack of certainty as a critical literary judge. My copy of Winter King has, at the top of the front cover in capital letters, History Book of the Year - Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Financial Times, BBC History. That's a large chunk of the "quality" press in the UK - plus the BBC mag and the Times Literary Supplement (which is a top organ of intellectual credibility here). Basically Penn has the substantial support of the "quality" (and hence opinion-forming) media in the UK on his side (The BBC has since done a documentary based on the book).

I've got a Penguin book, Winter King, by Thomas Penn - about Henry VII. The guy has a PhD in Tudor History, which legitimizes it in the eyes of publishers and readers. It came out in 2011 and has been a big hit here, changing the way people see the man. It professes to get inside his head, to which end (IMO) it uses creative writing techniques. I.E. Penn looks to have done creative writing courses and then applied the technique to his sound knowledge of the period to produce what is essentially a historical novel dressed up as history, Yet it's got rave reviews, from people who one would expect to know better. That's a judgement of mine - that they've been taken in by a historical novel dressed up as history - and I doubt I'd get anywhere trying to convince all those who have bought into it (they've got too much to lose and there's too many of them - and the subject is one I'm not a specialist in). The book makes a really, really dumb mistake in its introduction: "Perhaps the most telling verdict of all is that of Shakespeare, who omits Henry VII altogether from his sequence of history plays..." Actually Henry appears in one of the Henry VI plays (in a minor role) and in Richard III (in quite a substantial one). I'm not a Shakespeare expert and I had to look it up to check it, but I thought "well surely Henry VII might appear in Richard III" - and, sure enough, there he was. But nobody at Penguin - and certainly not Penn, with his bold wrong-headed certainty, could be bothered to do so. It just really gives you pause, this sort of thing. I mean this is basic stuff, knowing your Shakespeare - and that a trusted publisher like Penguin doesn't have the staff at hand to pick up this howler, it's just frightening. So, from that point, I go to the book is horseshit and nobody's picking it up.

The use of the word "ghouls" is distasteful in an obituary thread.

"When I showed up, the Jazz Composers Guild had already been in place for several meetings. There was already tension in the group, because of Bill [Dixon]'s notion that we were all going to form a cooperative against the record companies of the world. We would deny our services collectively to band leaders, to any record company, until we could form our own record company, which would take the lion's share of the profits in return for minor administrative tasks, which is how the musicians perceived the record companies. However, Archie Shepp had just been offered a contract with Impulse, and Bill believed that he should turn it down. You could see his point; it was built into the name: guilds strike. Historically, that's what they do. But Archie had a family to support and he sure wasn't going to turn down any money, certainly not a lump of money like an Impulse contract. That was is for Bill. He got up and left the meeting. He didn't return until months later. That was a problem because he was the founder. After that, Roswell Rudd and I ran the Guild for over a year[.] We started putting on weekly concerts where 5 bands would play... After the "October Revolution" Concert at The Cellar in 1964, enthusiasm was high - the phone started ringing and didn't stop ringing. We found the New York press loved the idea of a musician-run co-op... Months later, Bill Dixon showed up at a meeting and announced he was taking over the Guild again. We said. "OK, no problem. We're overworked and we'd love to have you." At this point the meetings were very well attended, because we realized that if we stopped showing up at meetings, the Guild would cease to exist... Bill said "...I want to have meetings at my house." The meeting was called, everyone agreed to show up, and we filed out. But when the meeting time came....nobody showed up..." Stopping Time - Paul Bley p92-7