Hot Ptah

Shawn, I went back and read your first post on the thread. Do you have any questions there, which you think weren't fully answered?

Jerry Mathers Hugh Beamont Tony Dow

Norm Masters Forrest Gregg Bob Skoronski

That's very much what I remember - the catholicity. Not everyone liked everything but there was a sense that you could follow any one of a large number of paths. A question. I've mentioned the way that the 70s have been demonised by the punk/new wave biases of rock journalism, asserting that rock music must confine itself to narrow limits or it will slip into pretension. Is this a strictly British phenomena? I'm actually amazed how often I read comment in magazines and on bulletin boards by people who were too young to be around in the 70s yet who accept the idea that it was all bloated self-indulgence as gospel. I think that this was more of a British phenomena. Punk/new wave was not that popular in America among college students when it first came out. I remember going to the Ann Arbor Independent Film Festival in 1979 (a leading national indie film fest at the time) and the college age crowd booed and laughed in ridicule when a film about the Ramones at CBGB's was shown. There were certainly some younger Americans into punk, but not that many. There was not a widespread feeling in America that punk was the only way to go. I do know Americans who missed that era by about 10 years, and came of age in the mid-1980s, who mouthed the party line that prog rock was pretentious trash and that punk was the only thing. They still tell me that now that they are about 45 years old. They have never listened to the prog rock of the early to mid 1970s, but just "know" that it is bad. It is all stuff they read in the mid-1980s, when Husker Du and the Replacements were popular. In 1976--80, the many music lovers I knew had only a slight acquaintance with punk, and certainly did not feel that they "needed" to confine themselves to punk. There was no leading music publication in America at that time which influenced large numbers of people to believe that punk was the only answer.

I know people who work for large companies and they say that all of their employers routinely check the Facebook and MySpace sites of everyone who is interviewed for a job.

Most jazz songs were standards based. And those standards were not just sung by jazz singers. In fact I associated them with cabaret/MOR/supper club singers. They had no appeal at all, seeming to be Mum and Dad music. I know that when I took a shine to Ella's voice I had to suspend my disbelief listening to the lyrics. And that was the 'Rogers and Hart Songbook' - Hart is normally held up as an exemplar sophisticated song writer. But to a 19 year old the lyrics sounded Tin Pan Alley and irrelevant to my world. I like them now - but I wonder how much that is because they 'are' sophisticated, how much to me buying into the jazz view of the world. Very true. I don't think any young people today can fully grasp how rigid the "generation gap" was at that time (to use a much overused phrase) when it came to music. Just about anyone over a certain age, was it 40, 45, I am not sure, hated all rock music and would literally not let it be played in their presence. Thus there was no rock music played in public spaces, certainly not as background music, or performed on American TV. If a rock band was playing on a late night talk show like Dick Cavett, that was rare, and talked about as an amazing thing, as if a space alien had appeared on the show. At the same time, young people were pretty much united in their hostility toward older music, anything which came out after 1964. Andy Williams, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, those kind of guys, they were all over TV, and older people listened to them. So if they sang a song, it had to be bad. Then if someone like Ella or Sarah Vaughan sang the same songs, that was bad too. Older acoustic jazz, including Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and anyone else, were lumped together with Dean Martin in the minds of many young rock listeners at that time. It took a somewhat brave soul to turn their back on their peer group and get into older, acoustic, mainstream jazz. That is where the electric jazz-rock and fusion groups were different. They were loud, and would have been hated by the older generation if they had ever heard them. Young people could identify with them, both musically and culturally.

'Bitches Brew' was my first Miles album and nearly stopped my bothering with Miles. I hated it. It took over 15 years to click! I think you are right in pointing out how little that era of Miles impacted on the average rock listener. In the UK I'm not sure how available they were in the 70s but by the 80s only BB seemed to be easy to find. I waited a long time to get a copy of Live Evil - mid 90s, I think. In the neo-classical era of the 80s it was hard to find much enthusiasm for it - I recall being quite surprised to read Ian Carr's bio in the 80s and see it so highly praised. And Miles was still playing a variant of that music then. There's been something of a reappraisal of that period in the last ten years or so. For me the real problem with that music - and, I suspect a real problem with many rock listeners tackling jazz in general - was they way it often sat on a single chord for a long time or alternated between two. The one track that did make a big impact on me was 'Spanish Key' but that has a point where the minor key mood spectacularly changes into a bright major passage. An awful lot of prog music was built on the colouristic effects of frequent key changes - think of all those multi-part tunes which changed key (and often instrumentation...electric bit...acoustic bit...back to electric bit) several times. Attuning yourself to what initially sounded like a long drone with the same instrumentation throughout took some doing. And, thinking about it, maybe that's where Mahavishnu could break through. Not only did the look like a rock band with the guitar at centre, but many of their pieces were segmented that way. Think of 'Meeting of the Spirits' with its dark, energetic main passage and then the ecstatic, slowed down release. All good points. Also, the music of Yes, ELP, Jethro Tull and the other prog rockers, for all of its complexity, was usually quite melodic, pleasant and tuneful--it made you feel happy and good, plus you were able to feel like your mind had been challenged, and you were up to the challenge, so that was further positive reinforcement. On the other hand, the Miles Davis albums of 1970-75 were often, on the surface, dark, gloomy and unpleasant, and no matter how hard you listened with a deeply furrowed brow, you could not figure them out. So they made you feel lousy, and gave you negative reinforcement. Also, this now seems odd in the CD era, where a single CD is 74 minutes long and multi-CD sets are common. People back then thought in terms of a single LP, with about 18 minutes on each side, or 36 minutes in total, for an album. There were a limited number of 2 record rock albums, but they were notable, and most listeners could name the few which seemed successful. Most of them seemed padded with filler, and could have been better if they had been a one record set. In this environment, Miles Davis released many 2 record LP sets in a five year period. They all seemed really tough to listen to, for rock listeners, and there was just so much material there! There was no rock band putting out so many 2 LP sets at the time. So it all seemed like a mountain of weird, unpleasant, often boring stuff. I listen to those Miles Davis albums now, and can see where he was coming from, and like most of them to some degree. But back then, I didn't know any young people who were excited about the new Miles Davis 2 record set coming out.

I agree that jazz lyrics are often no more meaningful than rock lyrics. In their different kind of meaninglessness, jazz lyrics in the 1970s managed to alienate rock listeners, who were happy with a certain kind of meaninglessness, but not the jazz lyric kind of meaninglessness.

I agree with that, and I think that is part of what I meant when I said that the jazz-rock musicians had no feeling for what made rock appealing to young people. Even the strangest, most nonsensical lyrics in prog rock were acceptable at the time, because they were sung, and people wanted to hear that type of rock vocal at that time. Often the vocal section in prog rock was simple and catchy, and then they went off into more unusual music in the instrumental section. Tony Williams tried to sing more rock oriented songs on the first Lifetime album, but no one seemed to like those vocals at all. Again, a real lack of feel for what the rock audience liked.

Now that made me laugh!

Allen, you are a bigger person, with so much more going for you, than to get sucked into these feuds and grudges. You have so much to offer us from your knowledge of music. A small suggestion--I will say to someone who insults me in business, "you may be right". In my mind, I am thinking, "and you may also be very, very wrong, you stupid m------------" But I keep that last part to myself. It works for me. You might try that as a routine--whn someone insults you here, reply with nothing more than "you may be right." Let's get back to discussing music.

I agree with that, as most of them seemed to have no feeling for what made prog rock, or any rock, appealing to young people. The American jazz-rock musicians could have been much more popular if they had been able to develop more of a sense of that. The exception may be Chick Corea, in the electric Return to Forever phase, in the Where Have I Known You Before, No Mystery, Romantic Warrior era. His synthesizer playing and the "cornball monumentalism" of his compositions (to steal a phrase someone used to describe Rick Wakeman of Yes in that time) seemed to me to come from Emerson Lake and Palmer and Yes, to some extent at least. On the other hand, Corea stated in a print interview in the last year that he had never heard the Beatles' music until this past year, so who knows?

Another observation which I thought of, which I thought that Shawn might find interesting. I have been amazed at the iconic status given recently to some of the Miles Davis albums of the 1970-75 period. What I remember is that the young people I knew, who had listened to a ton of Hendrix and Sly Stone, and Zappa and Yes and King Crimson, and were open to just about anything, found many of those Miles Davis albums incomprehensible, and not very good. When Stanley Crouch calls that period a sell-out for Miles, I just don't agree. These Miles albums were not easy to get into for rock fans. I am thinking of Miles at the Fillmore (the one with the titles Wednesday Miles, Thursday Miles, Friday Miles and Saturday Miles), On the Corner, In Concert, Get Up With It, and Agharta. For some reason Jack Johnson was not as easy to buy or find, and was not as well known. Big Fun was thought of as more listenable, as being less of an endurance test to sit through than the other albums. Bitches Brew was known of, but not played that much by the people I knew in the mid-1970s. I remember seeing John McLaughlin and the One Truth Band live in 1979 (L.Shankar, Stu Goldberg, Fernando Saunders, Tony Smith and Alyrio Lima) and they departed from their rather mundane fusion to play a song which was supposed to be very specifically in the style of Bitches Brew. It sounded odd to everyone around me in the audience--people were talking out loud, "what IS this? how weird." Something like Get Up With It is now called an amazing masterpiece, ahead of its time, etc. but at the time, it was thought of as almost a joke, a misfire by Miles, at least among all the young people I was coming into contact with, who were really into music.

I also like Duke and Ray Brown's album, "This One's For Blanton", also on Pablo from the same time period.

I've got that set and played it all through once. Now I go back and listen to my favorite parts. It is from a series of concerts at the Detroit Jazz Center, a small room in a downtown storefront, which took place between Christmas and New Year's at the end of 1980. I saw Air at the Detroit Jazz Center that fall. It was a very intimate place to see a concert. It was so small that we all witnessed Fred Hopkins urging Steve McCall to put down his big bowl of chicken or tuna salad and come on to the bandstand, while McCall shoveled several more forkfulls into his mouth. The 28 CD set has a lot of great sections. There are also many of the endless chanting vocals which seemed better when you saw Sun Ra live, as there was often something theatrical going on while the chants were repeated. A rabid Ra fan will need to have the 28 CD set.

I alternated sides of Bird with Larry Coryell and the Eleventh House! Their first Vanguard album had an eyesore of a cover but was quite a good album. Randy Brecker was on trumpet and added a lot to the album. Are we back on track now?

The Blue Note twofers I remember were beige with orange writing on. The Mingus/Farlow was actually a Savoy twofer reissue - another series of that time. I had a Charlie Parker double in that same series. I recall those A&M albums - only lasted a short time. I had 'Closeness' and one that I don't think has ever been reissued - a marvellous Jim Hall record called 'Commitment'. Very much a studio record with each track quite different to the next - duets, trios, full band etc. Would probably have seemed to much of a 'concept' in later times but I still play it and love it. A beautiful version of the Albinoni Adagio (a track that has been cross-overed to death) with Art Farmer playing exquisitely. I remember Jim Hall's Commitment--it is a wonderful album. The Savoy reissues were great too. I got the Charlie Parker 2 LP set ("Bird/The Savoy Sessions") because it was the lead album reviewed in Rolling Stone magazine, which seemed much more important then, and much more geared toward music. It was very unusual for a jazz album to have that lead spot in the album reviews, with a big photo and everything. And to top it off, I was reading Stereo Review, every issue, for the album reviews, and buying as many of their recommended albums as I could. Chris Albertson wrote those reviews. I thought he was a great music writer.

Absolutely right on all counts. It was actually the tunes that I later learnt were from 'Crescent' that grabbed me off the Pablo album. I had many of the Prestige Miles albums, and the Bill Evans Riversides along with Monk albums and other things on those twofers. There were also a number of twofers from a reactivated Blue Note around that time - I had things by Gil Evans and the Tal Farlow/Mingus trio as well as a Konitz/Mulligan set that I've only recently acquired in original album form via various CDs. I remember those Blue Note twofers, with black and white covers, not really very attractive covers. Still, I got some excellent albums in that Blue Note series: Randy Weston--Little Niles; some very early recordings by Wes Montgomery; a Sonny Rollins set. Then there were the A&M Horizon albums, with the cover that opened up and had a lot of writing and artwork on both sides of the inner cover. Those had very attractive covers, and were easy to find in stores. I remember getting Charlie Haden: Closeness and The Golden Number; Don Cherry (with "Brown Rice'); some Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Big Band albums; David Liebman, with Richard Beirach; and others.

I recall chancing it with Dexter Gordon's 'Homecoming' album in late '77 around the same time as I bought 'My Favourite Things', a Rollins twofer and the Coltrane Pablo double LP from early 60s European concerts. Those records convinced me I could venture into 'proper jazz' and get rewards. I was also being hurried that way by the fact that the music I was used to listening to had been almost completely swept away by the punk revolution. I'm not suggesting punk destroyed experimental, improvisational rock - it had run out of steam by itself. But I was driven to look elsewhere. When I started earning money in a paid job in early '78 it was jazz and classical music that got my attention. The mention of those albums really bring back memories. Dexter Gordon's "Homecoming" seemed like such an important, common album. Maybe it was promoted heavily by Columbia. Anyway, it seemed like "the" acoustic jazz album to get then. By the Rollins twofer, do you mean the Prestige twofer series--they were two LP sets with the name of the artist on them in big letters. I now realize that they were reissues of parts of three or more 1950s Prestige or Riverside albums cobbled together. Still, they seemed to be everywhere back then, among young people getting into acoustic jazz. Those twofers were important because so much acoustic jazz, even from the 1950s, was unavailable, out of print, and there was no internet or any other way to find it easily. So to be able to hear an older jazz album, even if you read about it and wanted to, was a hit and miss proposition. Pablo was a popular label then, and you could get its releases fairly easily. I remember the Coltrane double LP from early 1960s European concerts--the one I am thinking of had a map of Africa on the cover.

Also, Bev, I have found it very interesting to read about your listening to Keith Tippett, Soft Machine, Henry Cow, and other British musicians in that era. I had never heard of any of them during the 1970s. I knew the name Soft Machine, but that was about it. It was a whole area of exciting music of that time that just passed me by completely. I have enjoyed learning about it from you on these boards.

Shawn, I think that everyone tends to romanticize the music of their high school years as "the best music ever." However, I will say that it felt to me like rock music was very interesting and always potentially creative and innovative from about 1966--75. Then to me, the creative spirit seemed to be leaving rock music. That could have been subjective on my part. I then found the same excitement in the electric and acoustic jazz I was hearing from about 1975 to 1982 or so. It did in fact explicitly feel like an exciting, creative time to me. Not so much since. Mentors such as your music store guys, and the members of this board, can be so helpful in moving further into jazz. For me, it was a very helpful, very knowledgable clerk at Discount Records in Madison, Wisconsin, who had been trained by the store manager, Chuck Nessa, a few years earlier--and then my big bang, the jazz history class with Richard Davis. I have often wondered if my jazz love would have faded somewhat if it had not been shot into interstellar space at maximum warp at just the right time by Richard Davis in 1978. That class made sure that my jazz love would only deepen with the passing years. I was very lucky.

Bev, That is really interesting. The ECM label was another big part of the scene in America, too. Around 1976-78, even the listeners who did not want to delve into mainstream acoustic jazz would accept ECM. It was a different vibe than the older jazz. Gary Burton, Ralph Towner, Keith Jarrett, Weber's "The Colors of Chloe"--they were "cool" for college age students. Then Pat Metheny came along, and everyone seemed to like him, among the prog rock, jazz fusion and ECM listeners. I remember very clearly that some, but not all, of my friends who liked prog rock, jazz fusion, and ECM, jumped over the chasm in those years, to Dexter Gordon, the VSOP Quintet (1977--on tour and the cover of Newsweek: Hubbard, Shorter, Hancock, Carter, T. Williams) and the other then-current acoustic mainstream jazz which was then about as popular as acoustic mainstream jazz ever gets. It was like a conversion experience to some of them.

I too asked that I should be blocked from the Politics thread within the past few weeks. The board is more interesting to me since then, and more pleasant. I was getting too wound up by the political discussions--I am not cut out for them. I have a theory about all this. I think that for some members, there was a bond of being against the Bush Administration and its policies, and a fervent hope that the Democrat would be elected President in 2008. So there was a many year common language and attitude about the political discussions, with Berigan and Son of a Weizen as the mostly loveable foils. Now that is gone. Bush is out, the Democrat is in, Utopia has not exactly sprouted up full blown immediately, and the political discussions have become diffuse and discordant. Instead of the common punching bag, Bush, we sometimes turn on each other. Just a theory. I also wonder if this is a period in jazz in which there is less to talk about. I contacted an old internet friend on another jazz board by email, and he commented that "once in a great while we even have a jazz discussion over here." He was only partly kidding. But I hope that we can continue to be civil and have interesting discussions here. It is a wonderful board.

Another thing I just thought of about that time. There were some listeners in the mid-1970s, who liked prog rock and jazz fusion, who were generally open to about anything, like me. I would have dug deeper into acoustic jazz at an earlier time than I did, if I had found a friendly mentor to guide me. But there were also music heads who were heavily into rock, who were doctrinaire about what jazz fusion they would listen to. It had to be loud, electric, guitar dominated, and enough like rock to be "O.K." If it sounded too much like mainstream jazz, they were against it. They would not consider listening to any acoustic jazz or earlier jazz. To these people, Weather Report became acceptable only when Jaco Pastorius joined, because he was like a rock guitar idol. So I would come into contact with that group, and would have to "hide" my early acoustic jazz passions, or else they would ridicule me as uncool. That just seemed to be too much of a drag to endure, especially as I was really excited about my first acoustic jazz discoveries. Then there were other people who would listen to Weather Report and my first Duke Ellington album, both, and like both of them. Needless to say, I was in a high school/college/grad school situation throughout the 1970s--that's the only way you can get such concentrated, frequent face to face contact with many other music lovers, as far as I can tell.

Is this meant to be John McLaughlin in the Mahavishnu Orchestra's "Inner Mounting Flame/Birds of Fire" era, in this new Schiltz beer ad? With the white clothing, double neck guitar, and reference to a past time, it looks like it to me. I never thought that Mahavishnu would be used to promote beer over 35 years later.