Hot Ptah

My all time least favorite jazz reference in a non-jazz context was written by Bill James, in his 1986 Baseball Abstract: "I do not aspire to be an Astros fan. The Astros are to baseball what jazz is to music. Think about it: 1) Jazz is improvisational. Jazz musicians, uniquely among musicians I hope, sometimes string the elements of their music together as they go, with no particular plan or outline. Do you think the Astros know where they're going? Do you think there's a score for this? 2) Jazz ambles along without crescendos or refrains, going neither andante or allegro and without reaching either fortissimo or pianissimo. A good piece of jazz only uses about half an octave. The ultimate jazz tune is a saxophone player undulating slowly between D flat and middle C. Similarly, the Houston Astros amble along at 80, 82 wins a year; the last four years they've been 77-85, 85-77, 80-82, and 83-79. Since 1969 the Oakland A's have finished a total of 216 games over .500 in their good seasons, and 169 games under .500 in their bad seasons. The Houston Astros have finished 70 games over .500 in their good seasons, and 67 under in their bad seasons. The ultimate Houston Astros season is one in which they lose on opening day, then win, lose, win, lose, win, etc. until they reach 81-81. 3) Jazz is usually played indoors. 4) Jazz uses comparatively few instruments. Jazz ensembles are rarely enlivened with sousaphones, steel guitars, oboes, bassoons, or any other instrument which might tend to break up the monotony. Similarly, the Houston Astros use comparatively few weapons, relying heavily on the stolen base and the starting pitcher, but with no power hitters, no batting champions, no Ozzie Smiths or Jack Clarks. Both jazz and the Houston Astros, in short, are boring. 5) All jazz music sounds pretty much alike to the uninitiated, that 99.97% of us who haven't acquired the taste; it's repetitious, depressing, ugly, and inclined to bestow a headache upon the recipient. Much the same can be said of the Houston Astros, well known for wearing baseball's ugliest home and road uniforms. Similarly, one Houston Astros season, one Astros game, and one Astros player looks pretty much like the next one. No, I'm kidding of course; the Astros have been a little boring in recent years, but they'll get over it, and I'm sure jazz is as beautiful, varied, and enjoyable as real music if you happen to have a taste for it. It's just that...well, I'm a night person. During the Abstract crunch (a fifth season, unique to Winchester, Kansas) I start to work around 4:00 P.M. and I work until daybreak. About ten years ago we went through a period where the only thing on the radio between one and four A.M. was country music. I've never understood this...I mean, if you don't like C&W in the middle of the afternoon, why do radio executives think you're suddenly going to be struck with a yen to hear some Merle Haggard at 12:59 A.M.? Now it's jazz; I listen to a mixture of classical music, rock music, and talk shows as I work, and at seven o'clock every evening, they all decide that I'd like to hear Count Basie. Public radio stations, usually a reliable port in a storm, have for some unfathomable reason decided that jazz is socially and morally uplifting, and that they have a responsibility to impose it on us. But if I want to listen to Mozart in the afternoon, why does anybody think I'd want to listen to Miles Davis all night? Ah well, I've got my Jethro Tull and a stereo, and baseball season's coming...what I should do is get a VCR and record a couple hundred baseball games, and play them back while I'm working. I might even acquire a taste for the Astros."

I think that I cannot have too much Duke Ellington.

In the Sports section of today's Kansas City Star, there is an article by Kent Babb about Brett Favre joining the Vikings. They are the Chiefs' opponent this weekend. Here is a short excerpt: "But like listening to good jazz, sometimes it’s important to listen for the things you don’t hear. What about the appearance that Favre wanted to join the Vikings, get paid for it, and play without enduring training camp, the most grueling and unrewarding part of the NFL season? How must that have looked to his teammates, especially to the other quarterbacks who’ve spent three weeks fighting for jobs? Sage Rosenfels and Tarvaris Jackson are suddenly demoted. Heck, reserve passer John David Booty had to give up his jersey number, stripped Tuesday of No. 4 so Favre could have it. Booty was given No. 9 — and much longer odds of making the team’s 53-man roster. The Vikings might be smiling, or at least pretending to smile, but one Chiefs player said Tuesday that he’d want nothing to do with the annual Brett Favre sideshow."

In the hallway of my daughter's elementary school in 2002, the second graders had a big display where each of their first names was written on an individual leaf. They were displayed in pairs on the wall. So you had Melissa Melanie, next to Jason Nick, next to Annie Meghan, next to Charlie Parker. As I stood staring at Charlie Parker the first time, during Back to School Night, a small child yelled out next to me, "Parker! Parker!" A little kid came running over, apparently the Parker of the leaf pair. The display was up for months. I imagine that I was the only one who noticed Charlie Parker.

Yeah, he and Bob Bush used to honcho a shop called "Campus Records" I think, just a few doors down from where Discount opened. I hung out there *a lot*. Bought a lot of RCA Vintage and (God help me) Stereo re-processed Decca Jazz Heritage LPs in those stores! Small world! greg mo Bob Bush was a great friend in the early '60s when I was there. Campus Records used to be around the corner, west of the Hamburg Inn. All my extra money (and some of my dad's) went into that shop. I imagine others are getting tired of reading our little stroll down memory lane, but I too remember Bush as a lovely, gentle man. He was very nice to me in the late 60s when I hung out there and helped guide me toward some better music than I was listening to then. To generalize this a bit (!), the loss of smaller, often independently owned record stores is a real shame. One can still occasionally find independently owned stores, mostly with used stuff, but they are largely a vanished breed. I guess they gave way to the big chain stores like Peach's and Tower, and then those folded to the internet. Of course, it's possible now to find material we couldn't dream of finding then (when we searched laboriously through Schwann catalogues, ordering and hoping maybe the record would get there in our lifetimes!), but the ambience and occasional educational value of such stores is sorely missed--at least by me! greg mo I agree with you on the smaller, independently owned record stores. We have lost some great ones in Kansas City in the past decade. We still have Zebedees, which fits the profile, and Prospero's Books, which is mostly used books but has some vinyl and CDs. I think that stores like that are a treasure.

I think that this comment, posted after the Howard Mandel article, has some validity: "Many of the more popular types of music tend to be less static in terms of their year-by-year development than jazz in general and part of the attraction is that people enjoy the process of keeping up with new developments, new songs, and new artists. Obviously, a lot of that interest in new developments is tied in with celebrity intrigue, and obviously, we-who-like-jazz know that there are always new developments in jazz and new artists to seek out, but many of the highest-profile artists in jazz tend not to emphasize new developments and continually mine the same book of standards for their material. That book of standards stopped accepting new submissions around 1959 or so." "Most forms of popular music seem to be anchored in a simple, steady, heavy beat -- unlike good jazz drumming that is in constant flow and transformation -- and rely on lyrics to an extent that is not honored by serious instrumental jazz (or contemporary composition, new chamber or "classical" music). Most pop music has a 3 - 4 minute length, whereas much jazz goes on longer, favoring immediate creative development rather than crisp, concise execution. Much pop music is highly amplified and broad of gesture, whereas much (not all) jazz is essentially unamplified and depends upon nuance, inference and abstraction. Furthermore, the values embodied/pursued/expressed by jazz musicians -- musical virtuosity, career endurance, personal modesty and the expectation of being marginalized come to mind -- aren't glamorous or fashionable compared to those of rap/hip-hop, rock-pop and country stars who flash their bling and booties, revel in rebellion or set well-established virtues in danceable narrative forms."

Well jazzydaddy, prepare to be shocked. I received my copy of Kirk's "Bright Moments" CD today in the mail--TWO DAYS after I placed my online order with Wal Mart.

That Earl Hines title is very enjoyable. Someone should grab it.

PM sent. As Ernie Banks used to say, "Let's play two!"

Yes, GG Allin is hardly the model that jazz needs to take note of, to become more appealing to the younger listener. However, his presence in the music industry at all, does provide a reference to something I have thought worked against jazz. As pop and rock music increasingly left the blues-based forms of a lot of late 1960s and 1970s pop and rock, and as punk, new wave and other forms not based in the blues became more popular, I think it became more difficult for the masses of young people to find a point of reference in jazz. It has only become worse as the years have gone on. Another way to say what I am thinking about here--it was not all that far from the extended guitar solos by Duane Allman on the Allman Brothers Band's Live at Fillmore East album, to some bluesier instrumental jazz. A curious young listener could make that stretch and get into jazz. But when the young person's listening is exclusively short punk songs, or rap, or speed metal, or grunge, or Spears/Cyrus/etc. style pop---there just isn't that much in common with jazz, to leap from.

I decided that I did not want to listen any more to the pops and surface noise in my vinyl copy of Rahsaan Roland Kirk's "Bright Moments" set, and that I would get the CD version. I was surprised to find that it is out of print in CD, and that the CDs command high prices on Amazon.com and ebay.com, from a low of $35, to $85 and over. However, I found a new CD copy for under $15 online from........WALMART! I like to patronize local, independently owned businesses instead of Walmart, but there is no local, independently owned business in my town with Bright Moments in stock. The Walmart online site has a decent jazz inventory, overall.

He used to be. She is now married to Bill Charlap. To get back to Black Narcissus, I think that bassist Peter Washington deserves more wildly positive attention. To me, he is one of those players who makes the entire group sound better--in addition to being an interesting soloist in his own right.

It's on Pi-Rite music. (I think that's a subsidiary of the Pi label, but I am not sure).

I am all for that. I wonder if it is lucky when the people "carpe deiming" happen to be perceived as a gateway into jazz by a lot of people. Right now we have people "carpe deiming" who are motivating people to download more Miley Cyrus and Jonas Bros. songs.

The Mahavishnu Orchestra (and countless other interesting and very popular outfits down through time -- for the young Sonny Rollins it was Louis Jordan) have no doubt served as "gateways," but what they did was not conceived or executed by them in "gateway" terms and/or in order to perform some "gateway" function. Think that way and you've got Wynton trying to be Leonard Bernstein at one end of the spectrum and Lord knows what at the other. To put it another way, if the people making the music aren't doing what they really want to do, why should they expect that anyone else would really want to experience it? IIRC, the Mahavishnu Orchestra played balls out con amore -- as did (for that matter) Roscoe Mitchell. I agree with everything in this post. So, when it happens that a group of musicians come along at the same time, doing what they really want to do, doing it with passion, and gain some popularity with it, AND serve incidentally as a gateway into jazz-- is that just an amazingly lucky set of circumstances all coming together at once, which happens once every several decades?

I think that this thread got off track a bit, probably my fault, with a dancing/no dancing distinction. In my humble opinion, the jazz audience could be larger among younger people if jazz was considered fun and "cool' again, whether or not there was any dancing involved. The Mahavishnu Orchestra was not a big dance band, but it was a gateway into acoustic jazz for a lot of people. I think that there needs to be something to serve as a positive gateway into jazz for young people today--no matter what it is. I don't know what it is or should be--but there should be something.

I can't really get into my 16 CD box set of Cecil Taylor's live opening vocals, from 48 different concerts.

However, Chick Corea's "Trio Music" album on ECM does create a mutually exclusive situation. If you can dance or party to that album, you can dance and party to Gregorian chant.

Terry Teachout wrote for the Kansas City Star before making it big nationally. I distinctly remember his review of Chick Corea's ECM album "Trio Music" in the early 1980s (with Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes). He praised it highly, stating that it was music not meant for dancing or partying, that it was music to LISTEN seriously to--which to him was the highest praise at the time. So he helped create the problem, in a small way, that he is now criticizing.

I was in college and grad school in the 1970s and early 1980s, and jazz was "cool" to young people then. The much-ridiculed fusion music of the 1970s created a genuine bridge from rock music, and many crossed over--it was common to see Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jeff Beck, Weather Report and Mahavishnu Orchestra albums in the same dorm room. I was part of crowds of young people who went to Weather Report concerts together--not because it was going to be culturally edifying, but because it was going to be FUN. Some percentage of those listeners also checked out acoustic jazz--Dexter Gordon would sell out the 2,000 seat Hill Auditorium at the University of Michigan, for example. In the 1980s, 1990s and through today, jazz became not "cool" to younger people. I blame the "Jazz Is America's Classical Music" crowd, which seems to be mostly people in their 50s and 60s who will have government subsidized jobs putting on government subsidized jazz concerts if they can sell that idea. To young people, "Jazz Is America's Classical Music" is like "Take Castor Oil, It's Good For You." I have seen two instances in which jazz was briefly "cool" for young people. One was in the already mentioned neo-swing craze. I saw a large audience of young people turn out for Illinois Jacquet's big band in those years, excited to dance. Then Jacquet turned in such a sleepy performance that the youngsters went away disappointed. The other was when certain jazz artists hooked up with the jam band movement. Many Phish fans came out for Medeski, Martin & Wood in a park, and then MMW played a Cecil Taylor-like set that drove them away. Young people want to have fun. For some of them, fun is listening to something with a degree of complexity, but it still has to be fun.

It's just a pickle, just a preserved cucumber, and yet, this cover is somehow disturbing. I think it has to do with the expressions on their faces--they are vaguely menacing. The woman on the left looks like someone you would not want to run into in a dark alley.

I have been reading the Steve Hoffman Forum recently, just to see what it is like. Every Beatles recording seems to be treated there as if it issued directly from mouth of God--the Beatles albums are all masterpieces to be endlessly adored, and to be vehemently defended against any contrary opinion. It's nice to read a differing view here.

Happy Birthday! May you receive so many LPs on your birthday that your home looks like a

I think that Johnny Winter's Woodstock recording may be the best of his career. I like his "Mean Town Blues" at Woodstock and think that his vocal is actually quite good, and convincing, no matter what his race. It's easy to slam something you haven't listened to, by stereotyping the performer. I don't like a lot of Winter's recorded output, but I like his Woodstock performance. To me, the release of Johnny Winter's entire Woodstock set is worthwhile, in that it catches him at an early moment in his career when he was at a peak. There are no other recordings of him from this time frame that capture this. I don't think that Johnny Winter in 1969 was ignoring blues vocals and just playing a lot of technical guitar stuff. That's not what I hear on this Woodstock set.

I will do November.