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ok I changed my mind - probably unwise to follow that line of inquiry. Post edited I will comment on the hair instead - surely a wig. A traitor to baldies.

The whole Hip Hop scene, actually, has to appear to be underground - spraying up walls etc - can that really be fully integrated, without killing it?

Reggae and Hip Hop - the to-and-froing of US to JA music is complicated. Lots of references state that DJ Kool Herc came over to NY from Jamaica as a teenager in '67, having heard the Sound system toasters etc - but at that point in JA, the dj style was fairly limited - people like Count Machuki, King Stitt had toasted only interjections and intros etc - and this was originally (1950s) copied from the jive talk of US R&B deejays on the radio anyway - AND, the music the Jamaicans talked over at that early time were US products - Louis Jordan etc... subsequently the sound system guys (Coxsone Dodd, Duke Reid..) decided to record local musicians - largely the musicians that the sound systems had displaced from the earlier live jazz scene (Don Drummond, Roland Alphonso..). This eventually led to ska (my teen obsession)... rocksteady, then reggae - at which point (late sixties) the practise of removing vocals from a track, and toasting (sparingly) over the instrumental evolved - and soon this became almost exclusively the b-side of every 45 issued (for economic reasons) - the 'version'. Then U-Roy, in '69 began revolutionizing things by creating lengthy toasts, 'riding' the rhythm and paving the way for the younger djs in the seventies... meanwhile DUB developed further, more manipulation of the rhythm track, added effects, full albums being produced, 'ghosted' from existing tracks - deejays not necessarily a requirement. But I think that Kool Herc's live twin turntable 'looping' or repeating the same portion of track for dancing was original to NY? Also - House music began after Hip Hop - early eighties... (know nothing about it though - I just remember kids on the school bus listening to it and thinking it was rubbish )

Of course jazz underwent incredible changes under that banner during it’s first 30 years of recording - but it was a different world - there may have been all kinds of reasons to not stray from the hard-fought prestige of the word ‘jazz’ - could the beboppers afford to abandon any link to it even if they had wanted to? - not just prestige at stake but a livelihood too... anyway, they were insiders already weren’t they? The possibilities within jazz were stretched, but maybe it had to be called jazz, in the same way that Marcel Duchamp still had to sign his anti-art artworks in the time-honoured fashion - or else, as he said, he’d have been put in an asylum. Nowadays the idea of difference, or disorder or discontinuity is much better tolerated (expected even... and probably jazz helped this situation come about) and so anyone who sets up a studio and starts putting out a slight variation on a theme feels the need to call it something new, rebrand it, give it a spin and see if it runs for a year or two before someone invents something else. The individual is valued over the ‘movement’.

How about 'be-bop' or 'boogie-woogie'...

It's hardly a fair comparison really - 'rap' is just a specific vocal style, fairer perhaps (though equally pointless) to compare rap to 'scat' or something... As for the influence of Hip Hop - merely, as you hint at, a question of rebranding - there have been an infinite number of new 'genres' that came out of Hip Hop... and its elements have been incorporated into just about every other genre - metal, reggae, bangra, punk, blues... besides which, the whole look of things has changed after it, look at the way people write on walls compared to 40 years ago, or the way kids talk (even here in the UK there's an extremely pronounced difference) or graphic design, TV shows, FASHION.. etc etc.

Interesting video (for someone who stopped listening early nineties!) – it sounds much more like performance poetry – more emphasis on the weight of words rather than the rhythmic attack… to my ears the music changed as the function changed, same as with jazz – from dance accompaniment to artform in its own right. I think the performer has always been in a very close relationship with the audience, each unable to escape the other maybe – hence a lot of the troubles with gangster rap (If I refuse to examine the music beyond its aesthetic qualities - a notion evidently problematic with black music – I have to admit that some of the violent stuff sounds very seductive – Ice T’s ‘New Jack Hustler’ for example…). Like the early Jamaican Djs who were really there to encourage dancing by toasting over the backing track – the old school stuff sounded playful … and like in Jamaica, once the technique is down on record you have to find stuff to rap about – but without a resident millennial religious sect to provide inspiration, the secular issues of everyday life seem a valid alternative. The sampled elements are as legitimate as Picasso pasting ‘real’ objects onto his canvases… Btw - being always drawn (through some psychopathological shortcoming no doubt) to the study of prehistoric animals rather than the currently flourishing, I’m also tempted to look for US antecedents in people like Wynonie Harris – but I think it’s difficult to place exactly where any precursors lie – there are probably real ones, and plenty of illusory ones – the preacher records, with rhythmic talking over a background congregation (Isiah Shelton’s ‘The Liar’), or someone like Pinetop Smith who calls out encouragement to the dancers over, and extra to the boogie background – much like the early toasters, but then there’s Emmett Miller’s ‘The Gypsy’ – which erupts into a kind of blackface rap halfway through… so I’ll stick with the DJ, the turntable and the hungry crowd!

At school I was into Hip Hop for a little while - I never stopped liking it but drifted away, the kids who really loved it became part of a whole scene - DJing, grafitti, clothes - same as with any youth subculture (it swept away the early eighties mod revival)... I loved these oldies as a kid (still sound GREAT to me!): Roxanne Shante Spoonie Gee

so what's 'electric boogaloo', and why did I write it on the wall of a supermarket in 1984 when I was 11?

Cargo Records are selling this in the UK for £50 (the cheapest price over here that I can see) and say that these will be the last copies... "Holy Ghost Rare & Unissued Recordings (1962-70) 10CD Spirit Box Revenant have let us have the final copies of this fantastic box set - once these have gone then it will be deleted. Revenant follows up its triple grammy winning Charley Patton box with holy ghost, a career spanning collection of the music of the sax titan Albert Ayler (1936-1970). " It has a 'release date' of Oct 11th I might get it, along with American Primitive 1 which has just shown up on Amazon UK again, no doubt for a limited time.

yeah, why not... though you'd have to act a bit grumpy

I guess that answers it really. I haven't seen Melmoth... I picked up a few of these things from Compendium bookshop in Camden ages ago - Arsenal, and the Leeds group's Manticore (and I was attempting some experiments with a particular kind of automatic painting/drawing)

Interesting - thanks. Yes I need to read those books... do you know anything about the attitude of the Chicago Surrealist group towards George Melly? At the end of Paul Garon's 'Blues & The Poetic Spirit' he attempts to highlight the few points where blues/jazz and surrealism have converged in the history of the movement, but neglects to mention the London group and Melly, surely the most obvious example (this presumably due to Garon's/Rosemont's ideas about whites singing blues), or is it simply a matter of chronology... erm... I've got other questions in my head but I'll read Melly's books first...

I was going to ask you (a long time ago - back on the Devil's Music Forum probably!) about George Melly... I wondered if you'd met. He was always doing radio half-hours at that time (2003-4ish) on Bessie, as well as on homosexuality in jazz, boogie-woogie, and sundry other things*. His shows were always entertaining and I miss them, but he had this particular delivery which belied his sophistication (probably to do with his illness I suppose). Very interesting about that party, and the 'surrealistic' dancing! - I suppose this was when George was a surrealist... maybe some of the British surrealist group were there? There was a documentary on TV recently about his death, and the period leading up to it. He was meeting with a succession of his 'mistresses', who were brought to his room to say hello (or goodbye, can't remember really), while his wife carried on as usual - then he was being a pain with his carers, and at the end did his last performance singing blues in a wheelchair - he was very emaciated. But you got the impression that his type are extremely rare indeed. *He also did a show on the British rock band The Stranglers, he had done a b-side with them called 'Old Codger' which was based on Shave Em Dry - with harmonica backing by pub-rocker Lew Lewis, who later robbed a post-office and got caught when he went back in to buy stamps, and got seven years... Anyway, frenchman96, I agree with Christiern - keep the letter, even if it doesn't compliment your legs!!

Registered Madness freak here (soundtrack to my childhood - I mean really) Like your tribute to the nutty boys (squelch). Next time Barso steps out, get your foot in the door ... Liquidator too - memories of the Shed at Stamford Bridge.

A few examples I love (much toward the blues side): Otis Spann - Nobody's Business Roosevelt Sykes (c1940 w Sid Catlett on drums) Little Brother Montgomery - early sixties (late in his career) sorry all have vocals!

Last time I was at Ray's jazz in Foyles Bookstore they had the box in the glass case at the back of the sales desk. Couldn't check out the price though. I was hoping they might have had the Patton instead ! Probably fairly expensive... I've only been into Ray's a couple of times since it moved from over near Covent Garden, but I was diappointed with the blues section, as it used to be all of the lower floor in the old shop. I used to stare at the wall of Document CDs like a rabbit caught in the headlights...

Anyone know of anywhere you can get this reasonably cheap in the UK? I missed it when they had it on sale for 17 quid a while ago, when Revenant dropped the price of the Charlie Patton box too.... presumably it's permanently up/out of stock now.

The risk of falling prey to this kind of injustice is just the reason I have carefully avoided producing anything of merit throughout life

The box grants the listener/reader with a degree of knowledge/understanding which it challenges with other angles... or rather, it goes well beyond the obvious - clearly this person doesn't have the understanding that's being challenged - so misses the point. Actually, I don't think they've read it... as a reviewer neither of these factors is a good start

I've worked as a designer on magazines for about 15 years - there's often a tension between the editorial dept and the ad sales - the ad sales push to have their clients included in the editorial... the editors usually resist as much as possible. The ad sales people say "we pay your wages" the editorial say "not for long if the magazine deteriorates" etc... But I don't think I've ever encountered a case where somebody is explicitly included editorially on the proviso that they buy an ad. ALTHOUGH, they do this 'advertorial' thing, that looks like a feature, but is paid for, and sometimes has the words 'advertising feature' printed at the top, and sometimes not.... Anyway it sounds extremely unethical to me. Once I did a scuba diving guide book that made it's money on the advertising, they didn't really need to sell any copies, so they just left them in the warehouse - naturally the advertisers were each sent a sample copy. They paid crap too (surprise surprise).

If you have kids, you can use them. A year ago my 2 small boys became hooked on Art Tatum's 'Elegie' - "Put the fast piano one on" they'd say, I look at the wife, roll my eyes and on it goes. I've managed to get the eldest to demand Flatt and Scruggs to be played. Little Richard works great too, anything they can go beserk to, and can name - "rock an rollll". Generally, jazz is more difficult... but tell them Roland Kirk is playing with his nose and it does the trick for a while.

I am kind of stuck in a rut with Monk - I became obsessed (well, not quite...) with his stuff a few years ago and bought a load of his albums, and being pretty unknowledgeable about jazz found it difficult to find other stuff to slide into. - I tried Herbie Nichols cos I read that he shared certain characteristics, and I like him but... The thing with Monk is that narrowness - or, his limits force the inventiveness along a narrow path, so it all feels very regular and yet jagged - like he's stuck behind a wall being built by the bass and drums, and he's jabbing at the wall but is in no danger of getting out. OR his playing sometimes reminds me of a join the dots puzzle - fixed points, and he draws straight lines between each one, not necessarily in the same order, but always finishes at the same point in the same number of moves. This feeling is strong on some of the Columbias. But when he had people like Johnny Griffin or Coltrane it's slightly different (and amazing! - I don't think I've ever enjoyed an album as much as I did 'Monk's Music'). And when you see footage of him it's even more mesmerizing - watching him 'decide' which keys to hit. Probably the answer for me is to avoid looking for similar piano players and go for something else -

I think Dizzy's giving the bird on this one...

pteranodon - not a bird OR a dinosaur