Simon Weil

I don't know. I'm not really a guy who "competes". I mean I can fight and all that, but it has to be for something rather than just for the sake of it. Sure winning is good - who doesn't like to win? Most people pick up the something in the air - whatever it is that is happening at the moment - I mean people are just programmed like that. There's a kind of crowd thing that moves across. I don't really buy the "wisdom of crowds" number. I mean you can get really destructive (or self-destructive) crowds. But I think this was one time where what moved across was something positive, of Life. It's absolutely the case that a musician - or let's say an artist - can have an agenda. And, if you're a Blue Note in SA, how can you not? OK, let's suppose your agenda doesn't get realised and "the struggle continues". But the music here strikes me as something you are kind of squeezing into a narrow box if you treat it as "the struggle continues".

Can you articulate precisely why this is so? I'm actually trying not to look at Jazz symbolically and your statement seems to suggest that I'm doing so. I mean what am I symbolizing by it?

Sorry, my reply got lost in the body of the quote( Haven't got used to the software yet). I said: But doesn't looking at the music in symbolic terms and using it as a weapon (for whatever) tend to obscure the realities of the music.?. I think it's inarguable that a "baggy narrative", of the sort that says the "spirit of the age" both produced big changes in black society and the serious music associated with it, works. Like there was something in the air (to steal a phrase). ...... Not read the Jost European book, but his free jazz book, your one and Val Wilmer's are my trio of fall-back books for this era (as I'm sure they are for many others). I feel there needs to be something else out there by now, though. Maybe the time for this stuff is going to come again.

But doesn't looking at the music in symbolic terms and using it as a weapon (for whatever) tend to obscure the realities of the music.?. I think it's inarguable that a "baggy narrative", of the sort that says the "spirit of the age" both produced big changes in black society and the serious music associated with it, works. Like there was something in the air (to steal a phrase). here are many artforms in which experimentation is so closely paired with actual political struggle;

Well, the reference is to Jeff Schwartz's online Ayler biog. and he quotes Val Wilmer: "Call Cobbs: We heard some of the critics say he was beginning to get a bit too conventional, but then it was selling and they [Impulse] liked that. He didn't want to sing but he started to on New Grass because his friend Mary Maria suggested it. She had written some lyrics to tunes, so they sang something together and asked me how does it sound. I said it sounds good and it was original, and so I wrote the music out for him (Wilmer 1971)." So I guess that's like saying Call Cobbs transcribed some of the very late, kind of conventional, Ayler stuff. Presumably because Ayler didn't have the ability. I'm not sure that really helps you get at what made his earlier music tick. I mean a lot of it is based on sound and would resist the sort of standard transcription that I imagine Cobbs was trained in.

Thanks, Mike. Jim...??? http://www.scottishbooktrust.com/learning/teachers-librarians/schools-events-programme/jon-klassen-have-you-seen-my-hat [Edit +6hrs] Actually, I finally worked out what you were talking about. Took me a while, FWIW.

Well, it's been such a long time, who can tell? But, mostly, probably...Just as much a pain in the neck damn intellectual as ever. must be the same guy then - heita! Thanks, Ubu. I even like South African music.

Well, it's been such a long time, who can tell? But, mostly, probably...Just as much a pain in the neck damn intellectual as ever.

Thanks, guys.

Indeed, jazz reissue CD's are alive and well in Japan. Blue Note just had a bunch of interesting titles reissued the last two months there. When's the last time they reissued catalog titles in the US? 2009 or something like that? I just bought a bunch of Japanese jazz reissues from FOPP in central London for £3 a pop - a big discount on the £20+ I remember such Japanese reissues costing.

Well, yes. But.... I've been going round in the UK for years asking people what they thought about what's on TV, and pretty universally the answer is it's boring. And you get much the same answer, implicitly, if you think about their response to politics. The thing is there is a great paucity of anything new - and people are bored and they want something new. Now, this is just ordinary people. So I would argue that there is some particular vibe in the atmosphere, something in Western culture, that is holding us back right now. So that all we get is retreds - and retreds of retreds - and things that appear to be something new but are, well, just the same as before - only rearranged. And people see through it. It's just the the guys at the top are convinced that all the masses want is the same. Which ends up being a kind of elitism, unfortunately. And it is this, in part, which is holding us back. People aren't so dumb, even if this age is. Simon Weil [Just recently there was a survey, where people told the BBC that they want "More experimentation, more risk-taking". The chairman promised to deliver. We'll see. - FT 4th July 2007]

I dare say I'm going to get myself in trouble 'cos I know so little about RM - but isn't it that he heard Ayler rather than played with him. Also didn't he credit that experience with opening to him what Ornette was doing? So, in that light, wouldn't making the first track on "Sound" (Ayler's claim was to be moving from notes to sound) "Ornette" make a kind of sense? Anyway...I mean it seems like we're talking formative here. Simon Weil

I remember going in one shop in the 90s - a general shop selling books, records, newspapers etc - and asking the guys behind the counter what they thought about Jazz. Basically they didn't want to know and the vibe that came across was a deep resentment. Now this is only one instance, but I always took it to be an really bad sign. I thought this was the response of a couple of ordinary, though musically interested, people to a perceived elitism of Jazz. I'm not sure it's to do with people thinking that Jazz is "better" than other musics - rather I took it to be a response to Marsalis-lead pompous self-importance that you sometimes find in Jazz - a kind of ramming that inflated sense of value down others' throats. So, in that regard, I thought "we're going to pay for Marsalis". Maybe we are. I don't think Jazz is dead...yet. Simon Weil

Sounds like "Jazz is Dead". Just what we want to hear from the NY Times. Simon Weil

The thing about using Larkin is that one has to use his context: "Virtually the only compliment that one can Coltrane is one of stature. If he was boring, he was enormously boring. If he was ugly, he was massively ugly. To squeak and gibber for 16 bars is nothing. Coltrane could do it for 16 minutes, stunning the listener into a kind of hypnotic state in which he read and reread the sleeevenote and believed, not of course that he was enjoying himself, but that he was hearing something higly significant. Perhaps he was. Time will tell. I regret Coltrane's death, as I regret the death of any man, but I can't conceal the fact that it leaves in jazz a vast, blessed silence." All What Jazz/Larkin p187-8 And some more context: "Merely a raucous and inarticulate shouting of hoarse throated instruments, with each player trying to outdo his fellows in fantastic cacophony - yes, if it's the New Wave you are talking about you took the words right out of my mouth. Only, of course, it isn't, or wasn't. This, of the stately, and classic music of Armstrong, Morton and Ellington. It makes you despair of human perception." All What Jazz [1966], Larkin, p. 159 Note the underlying thread: the ugly squeaking and gibbering in Coltrane becomes the raucous and inarticulate cacophony of the New Wave. But, Larkin, no mug, well understands that this is precisely the charge that was thrown at the early jazz of Armstrong et al. He's self-aware enough for that. The trouble is, I don't think Pankaj Mishrah is, with his easy, smug generalisation: "Ratliff succeeds in rescuing Coltrane from adherents who disregard his strenuous work ethic (even his endless and apparently aimless solos were carefully rehearsed) but adopt the easiest bits of his legacy — the yowling and shrieking." To spell this out, Jazz has had to contend with charges of chaos from its inception. But this is not all, blacks have had to contend with charges of chaos in American (and beyond) culture in general. This is the wider context and people should be aware of it. More in my article at: Degenerate Music I worry that Pankaj Mishrah smuggles in a racist trope without knowing it. "Yowling and Shrieking" is part of that trope. Simon Weil

Well, he's searching for God. As I put it in my Circling Om article: You can go way back for devotional stuff in music. I mean to Gregorian chant, or Islamic incantation or any amount of ritual music, probably from the dawn of time. Even to non-religious people (e.g. me) some Church music is quite sublime. With all your debunking stuff ("easy slippage", "inarguable, new-agey quasi-religion", "Coltrane's legacy is ...that of a celebrity."), you seem uneasy with that. A lot of 60s avant garde jazz has a spiritual element - and Ellington. Simon Weil

A very happy birthday to a true gentleman. Simon Weil

I've got IM's rhythm section book, which I've dipped into and quite liked when I've done it. To me she seems OK - like I've got a good sense from her. I don't get the sense of her being overwhelmed with ideological theories. I mean she seems to have a coherent style - so that neither fact nor conceptualisation become dominant. Rather one informs the other and you get a proper bit of writing. So, in that sense, I would have to doubt that she's a pure academic. On the Billie Holiday thing , God knows, but she had a self-destructive (=?self-hating) bug somewhere. I'm not sure I'd bring that up as evidence for or against Monson's ability to write in her own area. There's a million academics out there who beat you to death with theory. I don't think Monson's one of them. My idea of her based on reading for (her) style. Simon Weil

I don't actually believe that Pete is going to produce the sort of mag that I want. I think he has his conception and it's not going to change. But I don't like it. I want to say so. I did. So did Clem. This isn't constructive criticism (which, my God I'd love to give), because I've made that judgement call. Unusually, Pete has been stung into response and we have our little stand-off. I think he is so peeved because he, rightly, senses that (some) people are not going to come over to his side. In real life, it seems like those stand-offs occur somewhat more easily than in Jazz. There's a Kissinger line - something to the effect that the reason debates between academics get so fraught is because they matter so little. I find StN too coffee table. Others don't. Pretty standard aesthetic debate. Simon Weil P.S. I think it would be a pity if Clem was, effectively, censored.

If one wanted to, one could suggest that the level of insight in most of the current writing about music is by and large equivalent to the level of insight in the current music itself. If one wanted to... If one wanted to look, one might see. Simon Weil

Well I just need some edge, penetration in the writing somewhere. Without that I just feel I'm wallowing around. Like it's all very well to document, but what about analyse? Order, construct, make some sort of sense of what I'm hearing. I mean that would be the main criticism I would make about writers everywhere (not just in Jazz pace Jon Abbey) - they don't do a terribly good job of making sense of whatever world they're describing. I have similar views about art/popular culture (see my thing about The State Within in the Bad Plus thread). It is perhaps unfair to single out StN for this, therefore. The question is why is this lack of insightful writing/culture so prevalent these days? You don't have that in society you're in serious trouble. Simon Weil

I subscribed for a while to StN and have the first 20 odd episodes. But what I don't get is why anybody should be terribly engaged by it. It has a good vibe (or had) and good energy but the pieces never seemed to be terribly penetrating. And in the end my subscription lapsed... It seems like the Ken Vandermark of magazines in sense of good vibe/sense but without real engagement. Kind of like a warm bath. Simon Weil

Well, isn't it that we start to develop our own identity as teenagers - and in this society, for the past several decades, that identity has been mediated by listening to music. That is we start to see ourselves as individuals, separate from our families, and part of that individuation process is listening to music which we take to be "our" music. I mean the whole music industry is based on that process, in large part. The thing is, of course, you might not like the music you came up with that much - or maybe it's love that music. Like I liked Rock but never really loved it. So here I am in Jazz. I just think Rock is about feeling triumphant. Simon Weil

Well, it depends what you're studying them FOR. You certainly wouldn't expect to get lessons in how do do something. There is a school of thought (OK a book) that says if you want to learn how to write radio plays, study ones that don't work. On that basis, I studied a couple of TV dramas - Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - and - The State Within. Both have an espionage theme and are well regarded. TSW is recent (2006); TTSS is from the late 70s. First off: the style. TSW is frenetic, TTSS is languid. This is line with the current fear that if you give audiences a moment ot breathe, they rush off and join another channel. Or, to put a more positive spin on it, TSW reflects the fraught society we now live in (I'm sure the film-makers' intent). Less equivocally, TSW is full of flashy camera angles and cuts you don't need - giving the sense that the film-makers have less than full confidence that their story is going to hold the audience's attention without these sorts of artificial flavourings (Jazzing it up). In their interview in the linked documentary, the writers suggest that they themselves were somewhat dubious about the credibility of the thing. It originated in a producer's idea rather than in any compelled statement the writers wished to make. TTSS started off as a book by John Le Carre, who had been a spy. So he had internal knowledge. TSW is just written by TV professionals. There is tremendous inner consistency to TTSS - a kind of integrity - which I would ascribe partly to that. The TV dramatisation takes the basic materials of the novel and really distills them. When you (OK I) look back on TSW it is just tremendously incoherent. Full of stock characters and a premise which is just plain stupid, it is just very obviously not written by insiders. See, that's where I think a bad work can't tell you anything. TSW just knows nothing about the world that it attempts to describe. Poor and average are probably (certainly) bad expressions to use. I tried, by talking about Texas tenor players, to illustrate what I meant. I'm not sure there's a word that encompasses it. MG These guys have something to say from within their own particular cultural milieu. That produces (I guess) that particular style. Kind of the solution of how to play Jazz in that sort of situation, it has a kind of integrity. Integrity is the word. Inner coherence struggled for. Simon Weil

Opposition to culturally-relativistic aesthetics need not rest on Platonic metaphysical assumptions , as it can arise among those sharing the desire to naturalize aesthetics . Many wishing to naturalize aesthetic values stop at the cultural level instead of continuing down to the level of human nature , largely out of antagonism ( rooted in political commitments ) to what they see as the essentialism of such a concept . Evolutionary psychology has helped provide an explanatory framework for studies demonstrating cross-cultural , trans-historical standards of beauty ( both of persons and of landscapes ) , so why are we to suppose that something similar could not be possible with musical aesthetic values ? If we accept the psychological nativism of Chomsky's linguistic universals , aren't we obliged to be open to the possibility of aesthetic universals ? Strictly speaking such an aestheticism would not be universalist or absolutist , since it would still be relativistic in the sense that it would be relative to human beings and the contingency of their evolutionary development . This is a particularly difficult post for me, Chas, because I don't understand what you mean by "naturalize aesthetics", which seems to me to have two related, but opposing, meanings. The ordinary meaning of the word "naturalisation" is a process by which a person becomes a citizen of another country. An alternative meaning is to make natural and since you mention human nature and Chomsky later on, I'm going to guess that what you're talking about is internationalisation. Chomsky is of the view that humans are "hard wired" for language and that all human languages have the same deep roots in this wiring. And you go on to say that there may be similar hard wirings in relation to aesthetics. OK, I'm not going to argue with either of those views, because I think they're probably right, too. The point I think I want to make is that, despite this universal hard wiring, languages are still mutually incomprehensible, their common roots buried so deep they are of little practical use in day to day circumstances. You have to study long and hard to grasp a foreign language. Just so, you have to study long and hard to grasp what Braxton called the "cultural aesthetic thrust" of a foreign culture, even a bit. And, while it's clear that there are common roots, the weight of the particular culture completely overwhelms them. I think that this is perhaps less so in music than in other aesthetic areas, though I don't know. What I feel pretty strongly is that, unless you can develop a feel for the particular, you're unlikely to be able to penetrate to the universal. Well, I was on the bus yesterday and listening to these three women talk in this foreign language. I couldn't make head or tale of it because it was foreign, but I also heard something universal in it - like women chattering among themselves - which was also foreign to me (being male). I said that and we made a connection. I don't think there is such a thing as an eternal English identity. Just like I don't think there is such a thing as an eternal Jazz identity. They change over time and are contested (PM word) within any specific time. There's also that line about geniuses being ahead of their time and the one about them transcending their time (which I think is certainly true). Both these tend to suggest that there was something in Taine's view for negative reasons. But that still leaves you with the contested thing. Also studying poor artists (or perhaps craftsmen) tells you how not to do a thing. But I'm not sure they tell you a whole lot about how to do it. Or, indeed, what's in good art - or Jazz - or anything. I think there are decent, functioning people (or artists) out there and they can tell you something about Society (or art). But I wouldn't call them exactly average - and I certainly wouldn't call them poor. But treating such people as "the truth" is unfair to their limited horizons. Simon Weil