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Very nice looking records though. AND my great uncle was Stanley Holloway, not the same one but near enough.

ordered it yesterday. Dunno what I'll make of it though - I don't get this mumbo-jumbo educated notes-sticking-out-everywhere futurist blues crap - I like the raw beer-can stuff that I can hammer nails outside in the yard to...

Cultural influence - often a person steps outside the culture and changes the course, away from self-reflexive expressions when the pathway has become monotonous. Or it is somehow ready for change. For example, the revolution in art that came out of Paris a century ago was not really due to Parisian culture - the ‘primitive’ objects that provided Picasso, Matisse, Vlaminck with an inspiration were not in the cultural galleries but in ethnographic museums and flea markets - mere curiosities. They were later elevated, in Europe, into ‘art’ only after their influence had already revolutionized the culture. Then, fifteen, twenty years later in America, Alain Locke suggested that African American painters adopt African art as their inspiration, thereby connecting themselves with a cultural history in Africa, via a revolution in Europe.

Forgive me if I put this clumsily - but there's a point here somewhere that I'm trying to make. There’s been a fair amount of comment - NY Times, Roots etc - on the increasing numbers of black atheists... clearly these individuals have felt outsiders within their own race. The words of Payton, and Wynton and others are HEAVILY steeped in religiosity (not that I’m against explicitly religious music - I listen regularly to black preachers with amazement and wonder) and there is an undertone there that implies that ‘spirituality’, or ‘heart’ or whatever in the music is a black thing, and intellectualism or cold ‘atheism’ is a white thing.. Jamila Bey: “Our culture dictates -- mandates, even -- that we be spiritual. Accepting that definition of who we are forces us to defend our blackness should we have doubts about spirituality. [Accepting that definition means accepting that to be] authentically black is to be religious -- wrongly -- and that to doubt God is a white thing -- wrongly.” The line that follows from Payton etc is to stop digging - we already know what this thing is - somewhere he says something like ‘you can’t learn blues, it’s given to you’. Where is the question mark? Where's the exploration? From that perspective, the act of standing up and walking away from Wynton, both physically and intellectually, resolutely puts you outside 'his' jazz, but I don’t think it’s dependent on your race?

what do you think?: Blind Blake slowed down thing related to grave etc

you guys aren't black? hang on - all the women here say aye...

Garon wrote the notes to the Documents, so I guess it'll be the same as in his biog - 'unknown'. FYI the man behind the username 'Sam Hopkins' on that discussion is blues researcher Alan Balfour, who left the forum a few years ago...

selling and saving souls

yeah - the same here, not only do I always have to call him Charlie Parker, but I say it the way I heard Jackie Mclean say it. Actually, his mum might be a tiring of it now

I have a friend called Parker who named their boy Charlie, without having even heard of Bird (it's possible...) & when I pointed it out (before he was born) she noticed her due date was the date he died - which freaked her a little. I have suggested Knocky for the next one (I mean the name, not the means of conception)

me too. Always love the sound of Ike Rodgers' trombone!

the four tracks with the sax are the first four matrix numbers on that date, the final 5 have no sax... which maybe insignificant unless the numbers were applied at a date after the recording to precede the Nov 25 set. In any case it's nice for once to consider those recordings in a context other than the prescience of Wheatstraw's own fatal accident shortly afterwards. The only comparable singer I know who Chu Berry recorded with was Ollie Sheppard - great records but I'm unqualified to compare players... (other than to say they sound similar to me, but with Wheatstraw's being maybe a little smoother)

I didn't realise you were gnomic - you can't tell from the photos

well - it reminds me of those photos people take of 'light drawings' - certainly it looks like a small source of light in movement. Like, say, a cigarette - stationery at the top, then moves down diagonally and is stationery again and the length of the exposure catches the movement of the light in a line, with two brighter spots at top and bottom where it is exposed for longer. As for the glow and the faces, to me it's just pixelation - for example the door has purple patches all over which could be interpreted similarly. Hard to say how much of the glow is 'real' and how much is enhanced by the brightening up of the photo. I have no explanation, of course, for what is actually the source of the light!

As a complete skeptic I'll stay out of the photo thing - but regarding the 4 year old, kids do say some very strange things. My eldest boy, when he was about that age went through a period of calling me into his room at night and saying that he could see small floating lights (this was long after the lights went out) - he'd point them out and say they were just behind me, or on my shoulder - then they'd float off again. Another time he pointed to the corner of the room and asked me "who's that?". Naturally it gave me the creeps! When he was a little younger he had two invisible friends, who used to help him do DIY(!) - one called Mr Screwdriver and the other called Mr Bosman. I've NO idea where he got that. It's unusual, I would have thought, for a four year old to know the word 'demon'? my suspicious nature would wonder if there wasn't some element of suggestion going on (unintended of course).

Think of the medium - spray paint on a train, in a limited time before you're caught - fluid graphic strokes, bright colours. And the original purpose being to leave your tag - get your name out there. So it looks the same within the things that define it - like all Brazilian woodcuts look the same, or all film noir... but now its only a part of 'street art' which involves stencils, pasted papers etc. But I love the names too. And of course there are pioneers and imitators.

only in the same way that so much jazz sounds the same

related to much of the above is the great little book by Paul Klee (who was aside from being a painter, a very accomplished violinist) - 'On Modern Art': "… While the artist is still exerting all his efforts to group the formal elements purely and logically so that each in its place is right and none clashes with the other, a layman, watching from behind, pronounces the devastating words “But that isn’t a bit like uncle.”. The artist, if his nerve is disciplined, thinks to himself, 'To hell with uncle! i must get on with my building... This new brick is a little too heavy and to my mind puts too much weight on the left; I must add a good-sized counterweight on the right to restore the equilibrium. ....... I only hope that the layman, who in a picture, always looks for his favourite subject, will, as far as I am concerned, gradually die out and remain to me nothing but a ghost which cannot help its failings"

it's not just the particular style or song that the less 'involved' music fan goes for but very much the specific performer, which would perhaps contribute to the fact that songs, or singers are popular - because they are more explicitly present in the recording. Hence people screaming at the Beatles (or BB King) and teenagers moping around believing Morrissey is the only one who understands them. In my experience, from people I know, they go for artists who come from a similar social background to themselves - its a perculiar sort of patriotism, the singer is their spokesperson or something. The accomplished musician is alien... actually, there's a lot of class snobbery in music audiences - and ironically most jazz would be regarded as too exclusive. That blog has some strange things on it, but, personally speaking, its stuff like: that ruffles my own feathers most and no it's not!

Fig 1: (I'm sure I had a life somewhere )

When I was a child, exceptionally strong men used to tear them in half (phone books, not pizzas)

ok - it's time to 'fess up and UPDATE my antiquated (but still great) copy of 'Bessie' (pure tight-waddishness that it's taken till now - I'm still listening to Robert Johnson on a Charly double cassette) re. the 'Muddy Water' issue - Angela Y Davis does neglect to mention the many many blues songs which have a theme of nostalgia for the south, with varying degrees of both 'corniness' and brilliance of delivery: Scrapper Blackwell – Down South Blues Clara Smith – Down Home Bound Blues Cow Cow Davenport – Goin’ Home Blues Joe Pullum – Dixie My Home Lonnie Johnson - Sleepy Water etc etc why it should require justification I'm not too sure - if the songs are to reflect the mood of the people, the disappointment of the north should figure as highly as anything else - and yes, she does transform that song with her delivery (and it needn't just be due to an injection of irony as Davis suggests, I think) - like Lonnie Johnson does with Sleepy Water. Also, elsewhere she makes an unnecessary defense for 'Need a Little Sugar In My Bowl' against charges of quasi-pornography - which is ludicrous of course - but she forgets to mention that it's supposed to be humorous - double entendre, which brings us back to Humphrey Lyttleton, who regularly got away with murder on daytime family radio. (Not that I didn't like her book..)

local funky-type pedestrians fraternizing/greeting/loitering in the street

All Monk’s compositions sound to me like they could have been drawn with a ruler on graph paper - and the Columbia recordings showcase this kind of self-restriction very well - Rouse’s playing doing nothing to spoil it for me with its own kind of constricted sound... (though i still probably prefer just Monk, bass and drums - ‘Raise Four’ on Underground starting with that repeated phrase which seems to say “this is all we have to do to”... but if I want to hear some ‘inspired’ saxophone I go to the earlier albums - there’s certainly nothing on Columbia that has the effect on me of Coltrane’s entrance on the first track of the live one at Carnegie hall (can’t remember the title) but then nothing on that album puts me into a nodding trance like ‘Teo’ on the It Club one. As was mentioned earlier - the rhythmic approach of Rouse is what fits - he sometimes sounds like he’s not 'trying', but I guess that’s the idea - kind of a facility or a disengagement or something. If the idea of it was to create some kind of reverie, it would be less Coltrane's intense exaltation and more the strolling crunch of sanctified piano - maybe - maybe not