SNWOLF

Thanks very much. I read the brief bio, listened to some of the tracks, and - at 73 - yes he's very much alive and kicking! One for further investigation.

Allen Lowe. I can appreciate your perspective on a self-involved and maudlin aspect to Pepper's ballad playing. I think, at times, that emotional valence does lurk within the music's hermetic lyricism, and if you're not in the mood, those pieces can sound self-indulgent. If you're in a particularly active and positive and purposeful mood generally, ballads by anyone have a bit of a "Oh, poor little baby; mummy will kiss it better" quality. I remember one day, I'd been doing hard physical work all day, was newly in love, and drunk a strong coffee, opened a beer, turned on Fun House, by The Stooges (my secular, rock 'n' roll version of A Love Supreme) really loud, felt fucking great. And then, I put on a Pepper record. What a downer. All I could think at the time was, harden-up and get over yourself Art, and stop looking for bitches to feel sorry for you, affirm your tortured genius, and play surrogate mother. Stop being a dependent softcock. So, there IS in fact a weakness, a maudlin quality, a bleary junky torpor to some of his music. But within that is an incredible artistic hunger, vitality and originality. In the wrong mood, you'd probably wish he'd OD'd in some scungy roadstop in the 40's. In the right mood, you are grateful for the musical poetry.

Wow Brownie! I'd never heard of this guy. A few sites had his name, but no audio snippets I could get to listen to. I found an album with some brief audio spots on CDNow, had a listen, and was stunned. Where are his PR people? Yeah, he's dead, but we don't get to hear a tone as new and striking as that every day. It has a kind of lilting sadness combined with a clean, direct breathiness that gives him an almost classical purity. Plays fresh, interesting lines too.

You're right about Shelly: a melodic, senstive, LISTENING drummer, but no wimp. His rhythms are tough and tensile, but he just doesn't hit you over the head with them. He PLAYS the drums, doesn't hit them, gets right inside every nuance and tone colour. And - HE SWINGS LIKE MAD!

I don't know how the hell I forgot to put him here the first time around, but....Sonny Simmons. The guy is absolutely sui generis. Have you you ever heard an alto slice and dice and puree a melody like this guy? His tone is so ALIVE. Now, given that I'm prone to the regurgitation of superlatives from a limited stock of personal overstatements, I'll have to edit myself right now and shut up - because Sonny Simmons is frighteningly brilliant and I might lose my grip and start speaking in tongues! Better yet, I'll think I'll put on Burning Spirits, crank it up, and get 3rd degree sonic burns from the man himself. And who said people don't speak shit the way they used to?

I love this album! It's some of the most unselfconscious, exuberantly whimsical playing Sonny has ever done, before his perfectionism started turning his playing to stone when he didn't feel he was experiencing sufficient flow to let go and be spontaneously inventive. I saw a documentary on William Claxton, and his claim was that Rollins initially loved the album cover, being a man with sardonic predilections, and so was happy about it. But the "cats back East" apparently gave Sonny a rough time for some kind of imagined infringement of Cool, it was too corny, uncle tommish, unhip. And thereafter Sonny went pretty cold on Claxton. Well, that's Claxton's version of events. I love that picture. It's droll and also dorkish. It's fun. What I liked about that album, apart from the fluid, organic playing and acute empathy, was precisely its sense of fun. It showed me that jazz didn't have to be a perpetual grim exercise in cathartic monumentalism and anguished blues to have existential cred. It could be sly and mischievous and unsentimentally melodic. A sunny disposition could have depth. A Sonny disposition could give you the greatest music in your life.

To Cornelius, who was in search of some great Pepper ballad playing: Lost Life, and Here's that Rainy Day, from Living Legend album. Ballad of the Sad Young Men, and My Laurie from No Limit album Goodbye, Valse Triste, and Over the Rainbow from Village Vanguard box set, or individual CDs. The Summer Knows from The Trip album Patricia, from Laurie's Choice Goodbye, and Sad, a Little Bit, from True Blues, and Blues for the Fisherman - both albums recorded live at Ronnie Scott's and out of print, unfortunately. Nature Boy, and September Song, from Straight Life Angel Eyes, from the Hollywood All-stars album There's more of course, the above is from the seventies to early '80s; but here's one track from an earlier album, Smack Up, that I enjoy: Maybe Next Year. It's a ballad, but has a strange, swinging pellucid confidence to it. Quite haunting.

To 7/4. Don't bother with Thomas Wolfe. Rambling, overheated, hyper-effusive juvenilia. Kerouac loved hum, and you can tell. Kerouac got into Dostoevsky, for the usual youthful reasons: heavy, dark, portentous. But to stylistically run after Wolfe in search of aesthetic sublimity was a huge mistake. Wolfe is more to blame for "Spontaneous Bop Prosody" than any number of "Buddha-like" Bird solos..

It's been a few years since I've read Straight Life, so I may be wrong here, but I don't think Pepper seduced any women in prison. He retails earlier in the book his sexual obsessionality and voyeurism, which he claims later was only cured by junk. But in prison he seemed to be mainly concerned with being "righteous" a "stand-up guy", not letting people think he was queer, and thus not becoming a girlfriend of one of the cons. What he DID do, in terms of sexual relief in prison, was sniff women's panties. He worked in the laundry, had full access to panties of various pungent grades, and went to sleep with them over his head, fantasising. So if that answers your question?! With regard to Kerouac, I'm not denying his intelligence, wit, or level of culture at all. Kerouac, Burroughs and (soon to be deceased, William-Tell fashion) his wife, Ginsberg, and others were highly educated, artistically hungry people. And I think the person with the most innate artistic talent of all of them was Kerouac, except his mamma's-boy immaturity and passive, egocentric dependency, a lack of toughness and endurance, combined with a lack of objective, aesthetic scrutiny, ruined a stellar potential. His addiction to alcohol put him in a morbid timewarp and prevented him from growing up, both personally and artistically. Ultimately he reacted in a hostile, self-loathing conservatism, which he never really fully escaped from, try as he might. He was always tied to Memiere's apron-strings, just as some young people make a lot of noise proclaiming freedom and champing at the bit for the simple reason that they're still in harness. As for Bukowski - a mysanthrope, a mysogynist, a lush. An extremely intelligent autodidact. A lover of classical music. An arsehole; a lover; a fuckup. An exquisitely sensitive temperament coarsened by hard times, callous and stupid people, too much booze, and his own self-destructive intransigence. People like that live in their own world, to escape the pain of the real one. They don't engage in dialogues, just humourous and embittered monologues. Imagine if you got Charles Bukowski and Herbert Huncke together and clicked "rec" on a tape recorder. I don't think you'd get much dialogue. They would instantly despise eachother, recognising themselves in the other, and they'd have nothing to say anyway: two perpetual raconteurs who need a perpetual audience. As to the inference that Bukowski sold out in some way to Hollywood. Christ - he was always a hustler on the make, if money comes knocking on your door you're not going to turn it down in the service of precious artistic ideals. He was near the end of his life, had paid serious dues, and he was going to enjoy the time he had left. Artistic purity is a game played by those that can afford the rent. For all the crap that oozed from Bukowski's pen so he could keep fed, clothed, housed, and boozed as a self-supporting writer, there were pages, stories, occasionally a book, that were so well-written, so uniqulely grizzled and off-kilter poetic, that it's worth ploughing through the considerable dross to get to it. As far as that Coltrane quote; I had a brief look on the net, still can't find it; but here's something along similar lines..... My music is the spiritual expression of what I am — my faith, my knowledge, my being … When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups … I want to speak to their souls. - John Coltrane "There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror." "My goal is to live the truly religious life, and express it in my music. If you live it, when you play there's no problem because the music is part of the whole thing. To be a musician is really something. It goes very, very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am - my faith, my knowledge, my being." And that's just a sampler, I'm sure, of many similar statements by Coltrane in relation to spirtuality and music; it' annoying that I can't find his direct quote about being a good person = great music, but oh well. I think everyone benefited more from Trane smashed on spirtuality than intoxicated on alcohol and smack.

I don't know much about Nelson Algren, except in a broad contextual sense, but as for Kerouac he was certainly from a catholic, working-class, french-canadian background. His stolid background, a dominant - and domineering - mother who seemed to disapprove and actively reject his every waking moment, his inability to break away fully from the levelling depredations of hearth and home - all these contributed to a conflicted and self-destructively passive character. However my remarks directed towards to "counterculture", as such, were aimed more at the spoilt, vapid scenesters doing a bit of look-at-me slumming before they turn into their parents. The inspirations of these people were often artisitically and intellectually valid, usually because someone in authority said so (but of course, they didn't believe in authority, did they). In terms of literature, I believe Kerouac had the raw talent to be a good, even great writer, but his maudlin self-pity, his alcoholic self-indulgence and incoherence in both life and art, his adolescent emotionality (he makes Thomas Wolfe look wise and self-contained) and his defensive, petulant inabillity to accept criticism and feedback, even from those close to him, militated against the full development of his gifts. As to Charles Bukowski: I agree with Hank that Ginsberg never wrote anything worth a damn after a Howl. I like some of Bukowski's work, but he was not really part of the Beat generation, he really came into prominence in the '70s, which was fortuitous for him, since the jaded romantism and sour disillusionment evinced in much of his writing is more suited to an age of hedonism and cynicism than quixotic flower power fluff. Bukowski put out an enormous amount of material, and some of it is just rent-paying, uninspired crap; but some, despite the hard-drinking, hard-man posturing and general anomie, is written with a strange, discordant, lyrical beauty and harsh economy. He can write, an unsettling frisson of tough and tender.

I love Rated X. I've got no idea how the vinyl version sounded, darker, more muddy, more resonant more - whatever. I've got the Panthalassa version, and I like it, but I find the greater balance and sound saturation almost TOO nice, too well-behaved. And Laswell's attempts at sonic origami on Silent Way don't work at all, in my opinion. There's a very intimate, strange and ethereal atmosphere generated by the original In a Silent Way and Laswell neither manages to recapture that langorous feeling or transfigure it into his own peculiar vision. The rest of the remix album, however, has splashes of genuine inspiration and sonic majesty - he does Miles proud. But the version of Rated X that I first heard on CD. I love it. It has this sinister darkness percolating away underneath with a menacingly claustrophobic funk rhythm that drops out precipitously as Miles Davis, perversely, leans on the organ and generates dissonance of magnificent, willful nastiness. He just being a prick. And yet, aesthetically, it's evil and it works. If any track in the seventies could convey cocaine agitation and grandiosity sliding towards dark psychosis, this is the track. It makes Sly and the Family Stone sound like the Smurfs.

How about these two british sax players, both alto players with their own sound whose playing keeps maturing: Soweto Kinch. Tony Kofi. Worth checking out.

With regards to libertarianism, only a certain percentage of the conservative population call themselves libertarian. They may have some sympathies with the economic theories that undergird libertarian theory, but generally conservatives find libertarians just too weird, eclectic, and individualistic. I suspect also that there are some modern day liberals who once upon a time would have been flag-waving lefties, but who find the modern day left far too doctrinaire and puritanical. Myself, I would call myself centre-left; boring I know, but that's where I stand. It's very interesting reading publications from the seventies and seeing how the antic vibrancy and sensuality of the left congealed into a very prim and sententious, school-marmish thou-shalt-not. For any passionate, freethinking individual that was a major turnoff, and I suspect a lot of very intelligent and talented people decided ultimately, fuck-it, and became nihilistic, hedonistic consumers in a blinkered, reactionary way (cocaine optional). It's almost as if the virus of po-faced presbytarianism, which 60s expressionism was trying to liberate itself from, reconfigured itself politically and invaded the host, turning the left into their parents and drying up all the juices. Cornelius - as to the Coltrane quote, I'm moving house at the moment so I'm furtively gaining access to computers here and there while I write the odd missive and check email. You could trying googling it. Haden did his be pure of heart number on a recent interview that is on Allaboutjazz, but I've read other interviews where he spreads that particular gospel.

I'm interested in what both Chuck Nessa and Allen Lowe have to say about Art Pepper. Obviously, via his book and the odd article, I'm getting a fairly edited, spin-doctored version. As to Art Pepper's "working it", I can imagine that only too well. I've been around enough junkies to know they put the best car salesman or charismatic religious preacher to shame - i.e. the ultimate conmen. I remember an interview with a drummer that played with Charlie Parker (Lou Levy? Might be wrong) who had been a junkie himself during Parker's prime, and when asked about Parker's mercurial brilliance, his various masks etc, his answer was blunt: that Parker was a conman, so acting came easy. It's hard to know whether Pepper exhibited bullshitting, hustling, sociopathic tendencies because of years of junkie conniving, or because he was naturally devious. Going by some of the comments in Straight Life, I suspect the latter. I remember the first time I saw Notes of a Jazz Survivor, and was really dissappointed initially: I had built up this portrait of Art in my mind, and when I saw his swaying, sneaky visage in the flesh he just seemed like another two-bit, lying, self-obsessed junkie loser. I think all this in many ways negates the earnest belief by people like John Coltrane and Charlie Haden that, in effect, you have to be a beautiful person to play beautiful music. Well, Art Pepper , Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and others in the major creep category demonstrate that aesthetic sublimity doesn't have to come from a gilded soul. Allen: yeah, you're right about the cultural benefits of various boho shifts. For example, people discovered that a lot of the ideals of the sexual revolution were not practicable, because of that annoying bugbear sexual jealousy. Yet generally (promise-keepers excepted) the maturity, transparency and pill-induced fearless pleasure of sex has increased, immeasurably. Kids will usually tend to excess, and the wonderful thing is, once the dust has settled, and the flakiness has been separated from the pragmatic, society usually benefits emotionally and culturally. And conservatives, through osmosis, often loosen up too. A conservative of today is a very different beast to one 30 years ago, although they would be very reluctant to admit how substantial the effect of liberal thinking has been on their values. So yes, a bit of extrapolation and overstatement on my part, rhetorical exaggeration to make a point, but I think the central permises hold. As to Zappa's later material: I find it anal-retentive and clinical. Classic boy-nerd humour over rigid perfectionism. The stuff of his later period I can put up with is his live material, when HE plays guitar, and not the tasteless stunt-guitar showoffs. A lot of the beat writing appeals to teenagers (not surprising). I find that painters and musicians like it more than writers, since writing has a very different aesthetic to music and painting. That is, writing is a DRY medium, whereas music and painting is a SATURATED medium. For example, you can pile on the passion, like Coltrane going ballistic, and it's emotional, intense, it transports you. You apply the same aesthetic to writing and it's turgid, purple. As another example, there are some great lyricists, whose romantic, poetic sensibility is liberated by the constraints of the song form, yet when given a broader canvas, such as the short story or the novel, it's unreadable. A classic example is Nick Cave, whose book And the Ass Saw the Angel, is truly awful, excruciating. I liked Junky and Naked Lunch, however. Although the original letters to Ginsberg, pre wanton cut-ups, actually make for better reading. Burroughs was a brilliant letter writer. When it comes to the Beats, ultimately I have to concur with Gore Vidal, who regarded them as marginal figures, who wouldn't have achieved the profile they did were it not for the extraordinary networking and promotional skills of Ginsberg. That perhaps is an over-haughty dismissal from Vidal, and like myself he appears given to sweeping overstatement for rhetorical effect (beware literal-minded pedants) but the forlorn, self-pitying, alcoholic bathos of Kerouac is not a destination I'm heading any time soon.

I've skimmed throught the comments here, and a review by E.J. Iannelli in All About Jazz, and I'm intrigued enough to put an order in. The artist as a social rebel chapter interests me, since jazz has been trying to clean its image up and present a sanitised, respectable front as a solid affirmation of cultural seriousness and high-brow gravitas. Anything that deviates from this is dismissed by Crouch and his mates as decadence, self-indulgence, etc etc et al. The fact is art has always been accompanied by deviance of one sort or another, whether chemical or charismatic - in the righteous spiritual or radical political sense. While conservatism, and the conservative sensibility and praxis is crucial for the preservation of great works (they CONSERVE them), normative deviance walks hand in hand with a lot of truly creative artistic products. The book review was interesting to me for one reason, at least: Ortega Y Gassett. I read his Revolt of the Masses years ago, and was impressed by many of his points, but he suffered from the same problem that the more populist H.L. Mencken did: that is, they don't understand that artistic depth, substance, quality and meaning does not necessarily run in tandem with specious, socially-mediated notions of vulgarity and refinement. Mencken loathed jazz. He didn't think that highly of blacks either, with his muddle-headed notions of racial superiority that he had misappropriated from Nietzsche. Mencken had it in for Jews from time to time too. I've got no idea what Gassett thought about the notion that you can have a sophisticated art form that exhibits a unified sensibility; that is, balls, heart, and brains, in full integrated communication. Now, that is where I DO agree with Wynton's rhetoric: that IS democracy, meritocratic, SANS-entitlement, PRO-can-you-deliver. Frank Zappa gets a look in. After his 1970s output I stopped listening to his music. It became increasingly mean-spirited, peevish, self-righteous, and puerile. I think half the reason for that was he was a very smart guy in a very dumb industry. I re-read his "autobiography" a couple of years ago and I was awe-struck at how a middle-aged man was still foaming at the mouth over adolescent anguishes and fist-shaking alienation. Jesus Frank, get over yourself. But like a lot of emotionally and socially-dyslexic geniuses, they simply DON'T grow up, they're perpetual pouting teenagers who manage to impress with their vicious brilliance. With Frank, I would occasionally read his interviews. He would always have something independent and interesting to say, delivered in an idiosyncratic and savage manner from one-off mind. I finally got heartily sick of his musical nastiness when I was at a party, and someone had put on Zappa's "Suicide is for Arseholes". This was a day after I'd gone to a musican friend's funeral (he'd killed himself), and Frank's sneering, control-freak heartlessness just emphasised to me that it wasn't suicide that was for arseholes, it was Frank Zappa is for arseholes, and anxious adolescent boys. Women have always seen the neurotic insecurity that lies behind Zappa's angry bravado; but then, women have a habit of mothering ostensible tough guys anyway. As for Bill Evans. I liked his stuff on Kind of Blue, and "Know What I Mean" by Cannonball Adderley, but, I guess like Larry, I find a lot of his playing nerdishly coy, effete, cloying. And his exasparating choice of corny, winsome, nursery-rhyme fluff gets on my nerves. I don't see this as a case of turning shit into art, I see it as a case of turning shit into highbrow elevator music. Yes it's clever, even brilliant. Yes Evans has an extraordinary, nuanced, subtle touch at the keyboard. Yes he evinced an unmatched, deeply-felt interplay with his "Classic Trio" with LaFaro. But to me it just sounds like a Sunday Painter's water colour fading in the attic. It's decadent in a limp, mincing kind of way. I don't know how you will employ Rimbaud. Perhaps as an example of someone who liked to derange his senses. At least one thing came out of Coltrane's eventual abstinence: he got better. That's not always the case. Rimbaud went off to be a trader in Africa, and what little information we have of his activities there, it seems he had a thoroughly quotidian, miserable time. From inflamed poet to everything he was trying so hard to flee from. Although, if you take a more pragmatic, libertarian perspective, I guess you could say he was evincing his independence and self-determination in another capacity. However, it seems that when many jazz musicians, or artists, give up the drugs and booze, they save their life and sacrifice their art. I don't believe this is some lurid, romantic distortion. Just read the biographies, listen to the music, look at the pictures. Those guys getting wasted are in permanent overdraft, and they either have to stop or die. It's like anyone who withdraws more money than they've got: they can use it for a high old time, for impassioned, picaresque adventures. But you have to pay up eventually, and sometimes that price is death. Great art functions, and is created at, a higher emotional and creative intensity, and people can only sustain that pitch for so long. As for Kerouac. I don't know what Larry has to say about him, but he was my hero when I was 14; and to me that just about sums it up. His vapid, maundering sentimentalism, his unconsciously condescending purple prose enshrining Mexican and Black women and their dusky charms - yuck. He was trying to open up reality, intensify his consciousness, but what most of it amounted to was feeble escapism and adolescent self-indulgence. The various characters he celebrates seemed to me, as a pre-adolescent, a panoply of unfettered humanity. You get to meet most of these types in real life and you realise they stir up creative self-dramatising theatre wherever they go because they're in an urgent flight from themselves. They're brilliant bullshit-and-banter companions when you're smashed or running too, but ultimately they're childish, narcissitic, reactive, monstrously selfish pains in the arse. I don't think I would have been able to put up with Burroughs, Ginsberg and the rest of their mutual admiration society for long; despite the boy-bonding, they were essentially engaged in shitfaced monologues. They are "secret heroes" - to use Kerouac's coinage - for generations of suburban middle-class kids with arty pretensions - but the way I see them is the way I perceive a great deal of bohemia in general: it's not an alternative to the mainstream, it's the very EMBODIMENT of it: it's casual superciliousness, the sense of elite exclusivity, the sense of personal status based more on HOW YOU ACT, and BEING ON THE SCENE, that is, the sense of entitlement they were socialised and enculterated with in the suburbs, as being further up the foodchain because you are elect. Workingclass and immigrant families don't think like this, and that's why they make up such a small proportion of bohemia. And those that have artistic talent usually work their arse off to get somewhere; and if they can't cut it, they join the family business, or whatever, instead of drifting around being hip in bohemia. So that extension of bohemian privilige embodied by the beatniks, hippies, and beyond I loathe. There's this hilarious passage in Straight Life, by Art and Laurie Pepper, where Art looks around the hippie scene and dissects its fundamental fraudulence brilliantly. The difference between the intensified awareness of Art and the ersatz posturing of Artiness has never been presented better.

It's interesting how Wayne Shorter's tenor and soprano tones have changed, respectively, over the years. His soprano has sounded increasingly full, deep, and lyrically vocal, while his tenor, after the colouristic smears he employed with Weather Report, has become more abstract, husky, feinted and brittle. I loved Stan Getz's versions of The Peacocks, both with Bill Evans and Jimmy Rowles, but Wayne Shorter, on soprano, distilled that music's melodic essence to an almost disturbing beauty, a wonderful stand-out achievement on a soundtrack album (Round Midnight) that was a motley assemblage at best.

No I don't believe Wayne Shorter has a disorder that is either clinically diagnosable, or indeed "pathological". As I stated earlier, I believe he has reaped the "fringe benefit" of the mental illness existant in his family. If you study genetics, you eventually encounter terms like "variable gene expressivity", that is, different intensities of gene expression. In mild, or even moderate degrees, that expression is advantageous, or "adaptive", to use the professional jargon. In more severe expressions, it is debilitating. Nature is in a perpetual game of amoral self-experimentation in the service of evolution. To human beings this idea is utterly heartless, but we see it time and time again in the wild. The lion who breaks his leg and is just left to die by the pack. People don't do this (as much), we have a higher degree of compassion - both innately (although much debate on this), and institionalised via religion, politics, philosophy, ethics and culture. So those with EXTREME manifestations of potentially advantageous gene variations in mood and cognition domains actually get a chance at a reasonably decent life, whereas once they were simply locked up and forgotten. Further back in time, they were often sometimes killed, in mercy-killing fashion. Anyway, to change the subject: I find it interesting that Wayne is ambivalent about his Blue Note material. The first Wayne Shorter I heard was Juju, and I was absolutely stunned. I thought I had encountered the most transcendent tenor tone possible with Coltrane, and then I hear this album, Juju, and I'd never heard anything so uncompromisingly abrasive and declamatory, yet very tender and beautiful. I bought his other Blue Note albums and I have to say that I was initially not so impressed: his playing was a lot more cerebral and circumspect, and I wasn't at the age where I could fully appreciate the arcane tapestries he was weaving, just a bit too dry. Over time I have come to love this stuff. Frankly I think the Blue Note era was when he was at his peak. I've listened to his comeback acoustic albums, and listened to a number of bootleg albums with his travelling unit of Blade, Holland and Hancock. Impishly inventive, subtle, sly, uplifting, drolly impassioned. But sorry, it doesn't cut it next to the Blue Note material. I wonder if the Blue Note material is so associated with a period in his life when Wayne didn't feel he was properly on his Buddhist spiritual path to have the value he might ascribe to is more reflective, spiritually-focused adult existence. One thing I can say - he took the soprano sax to a level of poignant lyricism I haven't ever heard before or since. Conceptually his albums in the 70s and 80s may have been lacking, but his soprano playing just got better and better. He really turned that recalcitrant instrument into a haunting, transparent voice, much like Miles did with the trumpet.

A fairly belated response, but I'm new here. I initially borrowed Art Pepper from the library, on a whim. I saw the title of the album, saw the photos on the back, and thought: except for the drummer, they look like a bunch of washed up nerdy white guys. So, in a move of pointless, contrarian perversity, I thought I'd get it out. The CD was Blues for the Fisherman, and I've never looked back. Up until then the only saxophonic jazz for me was the cathartic monumentalism of John Coltrane, the paint-stripper intensity of Jackie McLean, the blistering profundity of Charlie Parker, the avuncular, sardonic generosity of Sonny Rollins, and the avian tessellations of Eric Dolphy. Art Pepper was of an entirely different order. He was intensely melodic, when I was at a youthful, self-consciously hip age when anything remotely melodic was rejected as maudlin and corny. His music had so much beauty and pain and invention and enormous depth. Deep blues and a kind of resolute, distilled, tragic drama. I hadn't, and haven't, heard such beauty in a saxophone player. Since then I've endeavoured to get everything he's done, both official and unofficial. The thing that never fails to amaze me is how endlessly inventive he is - there's this lyric potency that just never seems to run dry. Very, very occasionly his playing seems to be a bit perfunctory, his reed a bit woolly. But we're talking a constancy of genius here that, in my opinion, surpasses Bird, who frequently degenerates into licks and cliches - his own patented brand, certainly, but glib nonetheless. And I LOVE Bird. Straight Life is my favourite record. Not just Art's, but of any jazz artist. Although if the track Lost Life, from his first comeback record Living Legend, was released as a single track CD, I'd get it. There's an emotional and thematic continuity to Straight Life that maintains an evocative atmosphere much like Kind of Blue. The feeling of the record is different, but it has that same langorous, insular feel that invokes a poignant, hermetic clarity. I like this album not just for Art, but because the whole band is so beautifully sympatico. Red Mitchell on bass: what a SOULFUL bass tone - deep, dark, resonant. Tommy Flanagan - some of the most lyrical playing he's ever put on record - you can HEAR Art and Tommy listening, but in an entirely unforced, spontaneous, natural way. And Billy Higgins - the perfect drummer, next to Carl Burnett for Art Pepper. A MELODIC, subtle, empathic drummer. All these guys are so in tune with each other, playing so well, with so much heart, so much creative conviction. This album, for me, is the ultimate desert island disc. I'm always transported to a higher state of awareness when I listen to it. Thankyou Art Pepper! And a big, BIG thanks to Laurie Pepper, who loved him, and who kept him reasonably together so he could make his greatest contributions towards the end of an often tortured existence.

I think Art Davis is correct. Much spurious historical diagnosis has gone on in terms of ascribing mental illness to an addict or substance abuser. The problem with this is that seriously mind-altering substances can unbalance brain chemistry so profoundly that the individual concerned starts to mimic the behaviour and psychology of a pathological clinical state. For example, psychosis in speed/methedrine/benzedrine abuse. Grandiosity and narcissism in regular opiate abuse, semi-autistic withdrawal is chronic stoners. It's only when an underlying pathology is persistent and plain as day that a clinician can have any confidence in making a diagnosis - but even then, the individual concerned would need to be fairly clean to get an idea of what is really going on. Jackie McLean made the remark that Bud Powell was in a "state of grace". Here we have an example of nebulous, romantic thinking. I love Jackie's playing, and his straight-up attitude, but the temperament and sensibility that makes for a great jazz musician isn't necessarily what makes for good critical analysis. God knows what drivel would crawl out of Pharoah Sander's mouth. Charlie Parker's various irrational and excessive behaviours - the result of intoxication and/or clinical mania - was interpreted in all sorts of political and mystical ways. As was Charle's Mingus's when he got really out there. Religious and political romantics are very much inclined to impose some of obscure gnosis on fucked-up behaviour. I think that those of us who practice and/or enjoy the arts, and have a love of passion, exuberance and creative individuality, can sometimes end up making the same mistake the "squares" do: not differentiating between healthy and pathological deviance. Except, unlike most ordinary and conformist people, who appear terrified of anything remotely different, or "weird", we're more inclined to embrace the bizarre, the idiosyncratic, the peculiar, the taboo. Unfortunately this means that some people, who are not just expressing their individuality, but are in fact seriously ill, get cheered on from the sidelines by vampires who get their vicarious kicks from watching other people do what they don't have the balls to do - and worse; nothing like watching a psychological car-wreck. Wayne Shorter's bandmate, Jaco Pastorious, was one of these people who was egged on towards his own self-destruction. He had manic-depression; so does his daughter - also a musician. I don't know if there is any "psychobabble" in Footprints or not. I intend to read it, once it gets here. I imagine the schizophrenia of Wayne's brother Alan, and how that impelled Alan's premature demise, will be glossed over; I may be wrong. The defensive term "psychobabble" itself is anxiously dismissive. It is important, I think, to differentiate Oprah-style psychological vapidities, or self-indulgent theory-speak and metaphysics, from tough-minded psychological and psychiatric analysis. This is all quite relevant to Wayne Shorter, and especially his late brother Alan [flugelhornist, did some work work with Gato Babieri when Gato was more "free"] and to the jazz community as a whole. Nervous, flippant evasions to me constitute an intellectually-lazy cop-out; this is a relevant and topical issue that Tom Harrell did not speak about publicly for years hecause of the crushing stigma involved, and that he now only has mentioned because his musical credibility, and career generally, is established enough to weather any possible fallout.

I agree with Simon Weil that psychiatric and psychological labelling can be misused. It has been in the past, and in the hands of incompetent and/or rigidly conformist or venal clinicians it still is, unfortunately. Psychiatry is an area that lends itself to endless Foucault-inspired, postmodern and relativist analysis. It's all just about power, social control, etc. Well, correct: it often is. People betray their simian past in all sorts of revolting tribalistic, hierarchical, stigmatising ways. And in my experience the most outspokenly egalitarian, non-hierarchical members of our academies and coffee bars are usually the most autocratic, hypocritical and self-deluded of the lot. The extraordinary abuses that took place in psychiatry's past are certainly real, and should never be overlooked. They were the basis of the anti-psychiatry movement. While I disagree with many of the premises of the anti-psychiatry movement, the original "inspirations" appall me just as intensely as any diehard devotee of Thomas Szasz. People who deviated from the norm - rebellious debutantes, jazz-lovin' hep-cats, original thinkers, individualists - so many people earlier last century were shipped off, stripped of all civil rights, and abused and demoralised in the most degrading circumstances imaginable. That happened. That is real. Unfortunately mental illness is real. All sorts of alternative treatments have failed: the "moral treatment", various non-medication therapeutic communities, religiosity etc. And I don't think it is imposing prurient interest on Wayne Shorter and his family to talk about these issues. I respect the man and I love his music. As I explained in my previous post, mental illness, like addiction, is an omnipresent feature of the jazz community, as it is in the artistic community generally. Usually people want to sweep it under the carpet, as if jazz is such a self-serious monolithic force of artistic dignity such discussion is beneath it and trivilialises the most salient feature: the music. The other tendency, of course, is the Man with the Golden Arm syndrome: sensationalise it, give it the Hollywood demimonde treatment, decadence, hypos and all. Both approaches, and their corrollaries: demonisation, patronisation, and romanticisation, I find ignorant and immature in the extreme, yet these are the main approaches used in jazz literature and journalism; and here I was thinking jazzbos were such a sophisticated bunch. As for Janet Frame. Yes, a fellow New Zealander; died not long ago. A brilliant mind and an allusive poetic talent, best employed in literature. Oddly, her poetry was dreadful. She was committed during a time when psychiatry was at its most brutal and benighted, especially in a small country like New Zealand, which in the '50s was aggressively, oppressively conformist. Yet many of the examples Simon Weil uses - and others with prejudices founded upon abstract ideology and political theory - apply to techniques and conditions that are years - decades - out of date. Medication is not "psychiatric oppression", as some ideology-driven finger-waggers would have it. Tom Harrell would not be able to function without his medication - look at the beautiful contribution to the music he has made. Before the advent of mood-stabilisers and anti-psychotics, many manic-depressives literaterally exhausted themselves to death while in manic states. Before these medications became available, for some biochemically unbalanced individuals, smack, alcohol and benzos were a messy attempt to self-medicate towards some sort of normalcy. I heard an interview with Laurie Pepper - Art Pepper's widow - and she seemed to think that his years of heroin addiction, methodone maintenance and other sundry chemical refreshments were an attempt to self-medicate a mood disorder. To make an intelligent analysis of mental illness and medication, you need the appropriate lens. And I find that much postmodernist and relativist political theorising just isn't up to the task. The techniques I've garnered from anthropology, sociology, psychology, neurology, philosophy, political theory, etc, are all very interesting; but they need an appropriate OBJECT, and an appropriate CONTEXT. What I find is that when someone's intellectual background is grounded in a specific turf - i.e. anthropology, or politics - they apply the techniques they learnt there innapropriately to another domain. This happens frequently with psychiatry, where most writers and thinkers in the jazz world have no or little medical, or neurological knowledge or experience. It's also a turf war between the Humanities and the Sciences.

I'm not sure how "overlooked" these altos need to be to qualify, so I'll just assume that these guys lack of mainstream popularity, and the fact that I love them will do. In no particular order: Art Pepper Julius Hemphill Jr. Arthur Blythe John Jenkins James Spaulding Oliver Lake Jackie McLean Art Pepper and Jackie McLean are a lot more well-known than the rest - and deservedly so. Very different players, who seperately embody different aspects of the "jazz cry" that draws me in time and time again to their music. Pepper wins hands down in the ballad department: I honestly believe, in a completely biased and subjective fashion, that he is the most sensitive, most deeply-felt interpreter of ballads in jazz history, on any instrument, in any historical period. His playing is so profound and gut-wrenching it says as much about the conflicted sadness and fugitive joy of being human as the greatest art, period. Jackie Mclean I love for his wonderful, unique tone; a sound that is hortatory, exuberant, in love with life. It has anger and anguish in there, as a kind of perpetual undercurrent, but the overall feeling is positive, celebratory. This guy has a much lust for life as Iggy Pop. John Jenkins: what happened to that guy? Stylistically, he was too in thrall to McLean, but there was an imaginative vehemance there that would eventually, I'm sure, have developed into something quite personal. Arthur Blythe has a whimsical, Thelonius Monk quality, a peculiar, astringent yet good-natured tone and a big-hearted generosity in his playing and approach. Julius Hemphill I first heard on a Jah to the Jah Band release, which gets pilloried in the odd review I read. Allegedly a misguided attempt at fusion-inspired popularity, etc et al. Well, I didn't hear it like that then, or like that now. His playing on that record is passionate and intense, utterly unique and in contrast with a young Nels Cline's guitar and HEAVY bottom end, you've got one deathless piece of sonic assault on your hands. Of course, his other stuff is good too! James Spaulding. Probably most well known for his contributions to '60s Blue Note dates, such as Wayne Shorter and Freddie Hubbard. No one else sounds like him, no one else plays like him. He's got his own conception, his own quirky stories to tell. Cross deep blues with a ping pong table. Oliver Lake. This guy's an absolute monster. And he keeps getting better. Can play avant-garde squalls or lay down deep in the cut. His own voice, full of love, pain and antic mischief. Got his own sound on tenor, too. It's really, REALLY hard to get a good sound on alto. The few players that actually prefer alto eventually gravitate towards tenor because it's easier to get a decent, bold tone on. Most people on alto sound thin, wimpy, cutesy - generally nondescript. So those guys that sound GREAT on alto belong to a small, select group.

I think the objection to the assertion that Wayne Shorter may be borderline mentally ill reflects a confusion about what mental illness actually is, and the assumption that "mental illness" is merely a kneejerk pejorative term applied to people or ideas that deviate from the norm, or that threaten us in some way. Is Wayne Shorter "elliptical" or is he "borderline mentally ill"? Or are these merely misunderstandings and limited definitions based on nomenclature and cultural and perceptual valence? One thing we know: Alan, Wayne's brother, had schizophrenia. And the associative, oblique and whimsical nature of Wayne's creativity does share many similarities with "thought disorders" of which schizophrenia is but one. When it hasn't crossed over the border, that "thought disorder" is a distinct "thought advantage". Usually in the arts the mental illnesses most likely to strike are depression and manic depression. Schizophrenia and schizotypal disorders tend to be seen more in the sciences. Indeed, look into the family trees of a lot people prominent in the arts and sciences and you will often see high incidences of mental illness. So why would something potentially so devastating stay in the gene pool? Simply b/c in it's milder stages both mood and thought disorders appear to aid creative and intellectual excellence. As for the more severe manifestations, well as far as nature and evolution is concerned they're mere fodder. Man may be a moral animal, but nature is fairly amoral and monomaniacal. Were it not for psychiatric medication, many functioning artists and thinkers today would be dead, locked up, or lost in a hell of ceaseless anguish, delusion, or incoherence. Tom Harrell would not be making the contributions he is today without medication. So it seems to me highly likely that Wayne Shorter is benefiting from the "fringe benefits" of a familial gene pool that has a predilection to schizophrenia. I think it's time people start using mental illness as a descriptive, rather than dismissive or perjorative term. It might not have the louche glamour of addiction, but consider the reality that more than a few of our favourite jazz junkies were self-medicating mental illnesses. Many people, especially those educated in the humanities, and those who pride themselves on intellectual independence (whether coming from a hard-left or libertarian perspective) find biological explanations of mental illness fundamentally offensive; its seems to abnegate personal responsibility, intellectual responsibility; it appears to advocate victimhood; it appears essentialist and reductive. Yet people don't conceptualise this way with regard to disorders in other organs of the body. It is the brain that generates consciousness - and like any other organ in the body, it can malfunction. I think a few hours with Wayne Shorter probably could become a bit taxing. However, like a lot of people who have achieved excellence in arts and letters, they have an obsessional monomania that delivers genius in their chosen field, but renders them oblivious, naive and ingenuous outside their personal preoccupations. I have encountered some artists who, once the music stops, are self-absorbed to the point of autism. However you slice it, Wayne Shorter is a unique human being with an idiosyncratic mind. A brilliant, one-off creative force of nature and whether this current biogtraphy is good, bad, or indifferent it has done one priceless public service: it has stimulated discussion. Further Reading: Strong Imagination: Madness, Creativity and Human Nature by Daniel Nettle