Hot Ptah

Great story, Larry, and very interesting information about Bloomfield's background, more than I have read in other sources. Somewhere in an online forum, and I can't find it, a member posted that in the late 1960s he worked in the factory where the Bloomfield family patented items were manufactured, and that the workers routinely referred to Bloomfield as "that kid with the combo." This was after Bloomfield had played with Butterfield, played on "Highway 61 Revisited", recorded "Super Session", and led the Electric Flag.

In the Bloomfield book it says that he played great at the Dylan show, around 1978.

News Story dated September 15, 2018: Jazz Albums Hold Down Top Six Spots on Charts In a development which has become so commonplace as to become wearisome, jazz albums continue to hold down the top six places in all of the major music sales charts. The top ten albums this week are: 1. Allen Lowe/Matthew Shipp/Various Others--"Maine, My Maine, The Home I Love So Well" 2. Anthony Braxton--"63 Quartet Variations on '#^/6x(#)4-3]@5-^9/77+3#'" 3. Wynton Marsalis and Dr. John--"New Orleans Music That Would Be Grittier With a Better Trumpet Player" 4. Gary Burton--"The New New New New New New New New Quartet" 5. Pat Metheny--"Another Project That Doesn't Sound As Unusual As You Might Have Expected From The Pre-Release Description" 6. Lady Gaga and Marcus Roberts--"The Great American Songbook, Volume 4: Gershwin and Kern" 7. Scotty McCreery--"Reachin' a Low Note" 8. Carlos Santana with Katy Perry--"Live Together Again! At the Hollywood Bowl!" 9. DeathAnnihilation--"Death Metal for Stinkin' Corpses" 10. Usher--"Where Has All The Hip Hop Gone?" Jazz's dominance is not even fully explained by the Top 10 chart. For the entire year 2017, jazz made up 79 per cent of all music sales in all formats, compared to 18 per cent for country, two per cent for classical, and one per cent for the combined pop/rock/hip hop category. As has been described countless times by many commentators, jazz's rise to being the universally popular form of music can be directly traced to the 2011 release by Wynton Marsalis and Eric Clapton. From that one album, a true music revolution took place all over the world, to the point where the words "jazz" and "music" have become synonymous for an entire generation of young people. Those under 18 cannot believe that at one time pop, rock and hip hop were far more popular than jazz, just as they cannot believe at at one time people sat at computer keyboards and monitors placed on a physical desk. Ironically, the Wynton Marsalis/Eric Clapton album was roundly ridiculed by the jazz cognoscenti, who could not have forseen that the album would change their world much for the better. Many of those who posted insulting put-downs of the album upon its release now take in seven figure annual incomes, as beneficiaries of the incredible commercial expansion of the worldwide jazz industry.

Another example of Zappa with Jim Gordon, (and another former Clapton associate, Jack Bruce), is the instrumental title track to "Apostrophe".

This post is very interesting to me. I know that Roscoe Mitchell has taught at several universities. I had wondered how that went, because I wondered if his music would be so far advanced, beyond what undergrad students could be reasonably expected to be able to play or even conceive. But if he is rigorous about classical technique, that would probably allow him to fit in well with any music department at a university, which would most likely be dominated by classical musicians.

How did we get this far without mentioning Rev. Gary Davis?

This raises an interesting point. I know that on AllAboutJazz for instance, that in the "Musician to Musician" section of the board, only musicians are allowed to post. Perhaps there should be a rule like that here, that only working musicians should be allowed to post opinions about musicians. There is certainly a huge element of amateur speculation in my posts, for example, and I have questioned in the past whether I had anything to offer. I fell into just posting anyway, because I enjoy it. But perhaps we should be much more self-regulating about who can post in which types of threads.

Very interesting, Hot Ptah. I did an interview with Wynton at about the same time, and while he seemed less nervous to me, he did go on about the supposed weaknesses of own band (this in a rather confidential tone, because bassist Lonnie Plaixco, for one, was standing nearby) and about the AEC and "Destiny's Dance." That anti-AEC polemic was, I would guess, a direct transplant from Stanley Crouch, because a while later on, in a conversation I had with Crouch, he made the same points and cited the same examples, e.g. Lester Bowie's "failure" to play the correct changes on "Well, You Needn't" -- when of course the changes Lester played were a simplification that Miles had introduced decades before and that many players had adopted since then. The only bit of angst came when I played for Wynton a cassette tape I'd made of the title track of Coleman Hawkins' "Hawk Eyes," because I thought that Charlie Shavers' brilliant solo there, and the staggering exchanges between Shavers and Hawkins, might be of interest to him. I played it without first saying who it was, in Blindfold Test fashion, but without intending it as such a test at all, but Wynton took it that way and got very uptight/upset, as though I were trying to trick him in some way. We smoothed things over IIRC, but in light of your encounter with him, it fits. Larry, I find this fascinating that he said basically the same things to you, down to the details of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and "Destiny's Dance." Were these things that meant a great deal to him and were part of all of his conversations, or was he already being dominated by Crouch and others and merely repeating what they had told him?

Great story, Marcello. It is interesting to consider what Wynton was like when he was young, compared to what happened later. I interviewed him at some length for a university newspaper in April, 1982, after what Wynton said was the fourth performance of his first quintet (Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, Lonnie Plaxico, Jeff Watts). He told me he was 19. He was agitated throughout the interview, filled with angst of the type that would be familiar to any parents of teenagers. He talked about how terrible his new band was, and how they couldn't play. He said that there were no good young drummers in New York. He said that Watts was the best he could find. He had played "Eighty One" by Miles Davis in the first set, and was shocked that I knew the name of the song and that it was from the "ESP" Miles Davis album. He thought that no one knew anything about jazz. He said nothing about any jazz older than Miles Davis. He expressed great doubt about whether to explore the jazz of the past, or not. He seemed so negative that I finally said that I thought that the performance of "Eighty One" had been fine, just to break the gloom. He said that he had to think about whether to just move ahead with new music, or go back to revisit Miles Davis. He couldn't decide. He became very forceful in speaking against the Art Ensemble of Chicago. He said that they were bringing European 20th century classical influences into jazz, and that it was the worst thing that could happen to jazz. He said he knew that from his studies at Julliard. He said that he did not like playing on Chico Freeman's "Destiny's Dance" album, because Chico Freeman did not know the changes to his own compositions. The rest of the time was spent with Wynton rambling about how he did not know what kind of music to play, and did not know where he was going to find better musicians to play with. I quoted Wynton on the Art Ensemble of Chicago in the university newspaper. A few days later, the paper ran a letter from music professor Joan Wildman. She wrote that she knew some of Wynton's professors at Julliard, and called them after reading my quote. She wrote that his professors said that he had started one class in 20th century classical music but dropped it after a few weeks, and that he had no other class work in that era of classical music.

Because I agree that blues is mostly vocal music, based on songs, Super Chikan's "Blues Come Home To Roost" is my favorite new blues album of the past 15 years. And Henry Townsend sang the best live blues I have witnessed in the past 15 years. I envy anyone who saw Big Joe Williams live, in any location. I was born 10-15 years too late to see many of my favorites. Can you imagine Wynton sitting down to play with Big Joe Williams?

Well, actually, because I grew up in an isolated small town with no live music within any driving distance, I had listened to the Chess anthology sets of Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, and the Vanguard sets of Mississippi John Hurt, and "The Great Blues Men", hundreds of times before I first heard any blues live. I listened to those sets before I had any Butterfield, Bloomfield, or Mayall albums. It was not as good as hearing the masters live, and I envy you for having the opportunity, but it was not like I thought Clapton, Beck and Page were gods, and then had a revelation in my 30s that there were black bluesmen before them. I understand where Clapton, Peter Green, and the other white blues guys fit in. It just bugs me when someone says that a musician is basically without merit, and then virtually every poster to follow says, Oh Yes I Agree. I want to stir the pot a little with some other thoughts.

I saw Son Seals on three occasions play inspired blues guitar, just amazing. Once was in Madison, Wisconsin in the summer of 1976, when he opened for B.B. King at the Orpheum Theater and just smoked. The crowd justifiably was screaming during his set. I did not hear any great limitations to what he was doing. Besides having an original voice, he was playing fast solos. He was not physically limited as to what he could do by a lack of chops. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, in a small club near campus in 1980, he again played quite inspired guitar, with great energy. If he was a marginal talent, it was not on exhibit that night. Some musicians in the audience, who I had dragged to the club almost against their will, told me that they were awestruck. In Kansas City, Missouri, at the 1998 Blues and Jazz Festival, again, he was one of the highlights of the multi-day festival, playing memorable solo after memorable solo. My brother, who had never heard him before, was amazed. These were long varied solos, with fast, intense passages. He was not limited by any lack of technique to my ears. Some of his Alligator albums may not be classics, although I like them, but live, Son Seals was quite good.

Leave it to Moms to clear the whole thing up for us. I agree with Moms that Bloomfield was great. To me, Bloomfield is the standard for white blues guitar. Oddly, Bloomfield's collaboration with Woody Herman was not as exciting as I had hoped it would be. Maybe the suits who thought of the Wynton/Clapton idea should have thought of that. Maybe there is not that much common ground between contemporary blues and jazz, unless you have just the right players. Another example--in T Bone Walker's biography, "Stormy Monday", by Helen Oakely Dance, there is a description of how Walker toured with Count Basie, and performed in front of the band. He "felt a draft", and left the tour abruptly because of the lack of musical support and good feeling from the band. The fact that he abandoned the tour is described as a reason why his touring career went downhill.

I disagree. I think Clapton has his own guitar sound and style. I can identify it after a few notes. I think that many people find Clapton's voice very appealing, and to be a solo artist with longevity in the pop field, it seems to help if you sing too. There are not many instrumentalists in rock who did not sing, who had a long career. He is far from the worst rock singer. I have read that he was a reluctant vocalist when he started out. I agree that many blues/rock vocalists are not that good. I always think, where are all the good vocalists in the world--they couldn't find one? Every high school has some really good singers--what happens to all of them? None of them go into music professionally? What has happened in the blues in the last 20 years especially is that a large number of the blues originators, or those who played with the blues originators, have passed away. Compared to who you could see live in 1990, the real blues artists are almost all gone. So the blues club performances and blues music label albums, are now dominated by a lot of music that would not have been considered blues twenty years ago. It seems like anything vaguely "rootsy" gets a gig in the long time blues clubs. Aging white hippie rock bands, which would have been called rock in 1978, are now part of the blues circuit, presented as blues. There are discussions at Blindman Blues Forum about this. In that context, as unfortunate as it is, Clapton is not one of the prime offenders as a white guy currently presenting blues, without total authenticity. You can always identify Clapton after a few notes? I sure can't. Of course, maybe that is because I don't listen to him very often. But I don't even really know what to associate with Clapton. Does he have his own trademark licks? What are they? His is very good at faithfully replicating Freddie King and Albert King licks. You call Clapton "far from the worst rock singer." I can agree with that. I do not like his blues vocals, however, and do not consider him to be a good blues singer at all. I don't have any problem with Clapton's "authenticity" or the fact that he is white. I just don't think that he is that good, especially in the blues. Stevie Ray Vaughan is white and came after Clapton, but achieved a strong and distinct voice in the blues. If Clapton did that, I sure don't hear it. Everyone has their own opinion, and own taste. I think that Clapton, on his acoustic duet with Duane Allman on "Mean Old World", achieved more in the blues than Stevie Ray Vaughan did in his whole career. I always found Vaughan to be a hard rocker with close to no subtlety. I find the blues content of Vaughan's music to be very limited. But that is just me. We don't have to agree. Clapton's live soloing on "EC Was Here" and on the "Crossroads 2" box of live 1970s recordings contain blues soloing which I think is very good to excellent, by any standard. If you don't, that is fine. I don't even like Eric Clapton's music that much. If my son did not like him so much, I would probably rarely play anything by him. I just think that he has been totally dismissed by several members on this thread, and that there is more merit to his career than that. I would guess that he found the experience of playing with Wynton to be unsatisfying, even excruciating. He is probably too diplomatic to say much about it.

That is a really good point. This seems to be a project not conceived because the musicians had felt a spark when they jammed together informally, and felt the need to continue their musical collaboration due to the excitement of playing together. Instead, it feels like some MBA in an office tower thought it would be a viable commodity. Clapton's great lack of enthusiasm for the project seems obvious to me, just watching the video.

Would it not be the same "herd mentality" when the same thing occurs stating a liking of somebody's work? Sure. I think disagreement is healthy, and a well reasoned, supported negative opinion is very valuable. But I don't remember many threads where member after member says, oh boy, I just think Mr. X is so great. Maybe there are a lot of them and I am not remembering them. The negative ones stick out to me.

I disagree. I think Clapton has his own guitar sound and style. I can identify it after a few notes. I think that many people find Clapton's voice very appealing, and to be a solo artist with longevity in the pop field, it seems to help if you sing too. There are not many instrumentalists in rock who did not sing, who had a long career. He is far from the worst rock singer. I have read that he was a reluctant vocalist when he started out. I agree that many blues/rock vocalists are not that good. I always think, where are all the good vocalists in the world--they couldn't find one? Every high school has some really good singers--what happens to all of them? None of them go into music professionally? What has happened in the blues in the last 20 years especially is that a large number of the blues originators, or those who played with the blues originators, have passed away. Compared to who you could see live in 1990, the real blues artists are almost all gone. So the blues club performances and blues music label albums, are now dominated by a lot of music that would not have been considered blues twenty years ago. It seems like anything vaguely "rootsy" gets a gig in the long time blues clubs. Aging white hippie rock bands, which would have been called rock in 1978, are now part of the blues circuit, presented as blues. There are discussions at Blindman Blues Forum about this. In that context, as unfortunate as it is, Clapton is not one of the prime offenders as a white guy currently presenting blues, without total authenticity.

I agree that sometimes the discussions become negative around here. I think it is interesting to have differences of opinion, and that's how we can learn about different perspectives. What I find surprising is how often a thread will go like this--a musician is mentioned, someone will post that they never really enjoyed that musician's work, and immediately several other members will agree, stating briefly that they too don't like the musician. It feels like a herd mentality sometimes, as if the other members are agreeing with the first negative poster for the sake of agreeing with him. Maybe it is up to those who disagree with the first negative poster to state their contrary view more explicitly, that they like the musician's work, so that a discussion can go back and forth. It is easier to not participate than to disagree some time, but I think that's how some negative threads develop.

Well, I have heard a ton of blues guitar, live and on record. From my concert experiences, I would say that Clapton has been bested by Son Seals, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Albert King, Lonnie Brooks, Luther Allison, R.W. Burnside, Joe Louis Walker, Bob Margolin, and several others. I saw Muddy Waters live, although he was not playing much guitar then. But Clapton is not incompetent. Some of his live recordings from the 1970s are quite intense, and not without some imagination within the blues soloing tradition. He has some chops too, to be fair to him. I like some of his recordings in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, too. He has championed old blues in recent years on recordings, when he could have just retired or played commercialized stuff. To say that Clapton is a nothing musician, or that his only good music was in the 1960s, is not a fair characterization of his recordings up to the present, I think. Clapton is not one of my great favorites. I would not "fight" for him like I would if someone was stupidly saying that Lester Bowie couldn't play, for example. But he is not as lightweight as some of those on this thread have implied, in my humble opinion. I think that Clapton was poorly served by this collaboration. My impression is that he held back to be able to fit in with Wynton, but it just did not work. What I find incredible about this collaboration is that we have all had to listen to, and read, Wynton Marsalis scornfully blasting one musician after another over the years for diluting their music away from the purest form of jazz (by his definition), and for collaborating with commercialized artists. Now he's doing it, and not very well, either. So has he abandoned all of his strongly held principles? I used to hope that Wynton would abandon those judgmental ideas and loosen up a little. But I thought that if he did so, that he would play well and that it would at least be more musically interesting and have some energy to it.

Indeed, to me this is a major album, and very enjoyable.

I have had to listen to quite a lot of Clapton, from his entire career, because he is a favorite of my son. His entire recorded output is not consistent to be sure, but to dismiss him as without any worth is too harsh in my opinion.

I am not so dismissive of Eric Clapton as many here. I agree that this is a combination that should never have been attempted. I remember when Wynton fired his brother Branford from this band, because Branford was playing with Sting, and that wasn't pure jazz enough for Wynton. What happened to that idea?

David, you posted the Facebook message in post #177. Bill requested a friend post on his Facebook account that he had fallen back into a child pornography addiction and subsequently been arrested for trafficking it. Don't you read that as Bill admitting guilt? Surely if it were not, he would have asked his friend not to post that, but an indignant refutation. No? No, Bill hasn't admitted guilt in a legal sense. He has admitted that he has a serious problem with child pornography and that is why he is in trouble. Yes, that's disgusting. But he hasn't admitted that he committed any crimes -- let alone the child rapes that some board members are convinced he must have committed. I won't be surprised if he does plead guilty, but it hasn't happened yet. I'm more focused on the legal case, perhaps because I'm a lawyer. (However, I've never practiced criminal law and don't have any expertise in this area.) But I realize that's not all that matters. It's fair for you to decide, based on what he actually has admitted, that you don't ever want to have anything to do with him again. I am a lawyer too. I have not practiced criminal law, but I have been appointed by the local Court to represent parties, for free, in juvenile abuse and neglect cases. I am very attuned to the presumption of innocence and the uncertainties of proof in any legal case--I have seen the uncertainties of proof in many trials and depositions. For the purpose of this discussion on this board, I don't feel that those legal points are what the members are really talking about.

Thanks for that. I wondered what he had been up to in the past several years. Prior to the internet and one's ability to look up anything instantly, I used to stump jazz fans by asking them which musician had been part of the working bands of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington and Herbie Hancock.

You don't have to worry about me liking your selections. This is one of the most enjoyable Blindfold Tests to listen to. I am miserable at identifying musicians, but I am listening to this BFT repeatedly and loving it! I keep hoping that I will recognize someone as I keep playing it.