BeBop

Anyone read this? I'm inclined to pick it up during my next visit to an English-speaking country. What is hip? Defining the indefinable Historical lineage connects Emerson to Miles to Grandmaster Flash - Reviewed by Jennie Yabroff Sunday, October 17, 2004 Hip The History By John Leland ECCO/HARPERCOLLINS; 405 PAGES; $26.95 In a recent post on Gawker.com, the culture and media gossip blog, the editor took the New York Times to task for using the word "hip" or "hipster" 10 times in yet another article announcing the death of formerly happening Williamsburg. By this logic, the only thing less hip than Williamsburg itself is writing about how unhip the Brooklyn neighborhood has become. Such is the paradox of hip: Most of us know it when we see it (or hear it, or meet someone who embodies it) yet to even utter the word negates its possibility. Accordingly, a person who truly possesses hip (as opposed to a Williamsburg-dwelling, trucker hat-wearing, Pabst Blue Ribbon-drinking, vintage T-shirt collecting, greasy hair-flaunting hipster) would never read a book such as John Leland's "Hip: The History." Luckily for Leland, this leaves him a fairly large audience for his entertaining and lucid examination of the impossible-to-define phenomenon, which, as the author himself admits, may not actually exist. Leland, a reporter for the New York Times and former editor in chief of Details, is both authoritative and endearingly dorky. He has a weakness for goofy wordplay and outdated slang that makes him sound like a dad forming a "W" with thumbs and forefingers and saying "whatever," much to his teenager's chagrin. But his earnest enthusiasm makes him a trustworthy tour guide to the byways of American self-expression. Beginning with the slave spirituals of the early 17th century, Leland hunts hip by tracing the evolution of American music through minstrelsy, the blues, bop and finally to jazz, then forging onward through punk, rap and trance. Music is not his sole concern. Writers, philosophers, filmmakers, poets, artists, cartoonists, actors, comedians and Internet hackers get name-checked along the way. Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Terry Southern, Mark Twain and Richard Pryor come onstage for extended solos. But music, and specifically the kind made in the middle of the last century by men named Coltrane, Davis, Gillespie, Parker and Monk, is "Hip's" true subject, and the presence of other figures is justified because of the way they either anticipated or were influenced by jazz. Jazz musicians are, for Leland, the alpha and omega of hip. He forgives them their drug abuse, their misogyny, their willful nihilism and even Miles Davis' unfortunate predilection for head-to-toe leather. Whether you agree with Leland's contention that jazz is the wellspring from which all contemporary forms of American creativity spring forth, or you simply find "Kind of Blue" nice background music for reading the Sunday paper, Leland's exegeses on the practitioners of the form effectively mix insightful analysis with dishy anecdote. He sees ties to Emerson and Thoreau's ideals of nonconformity in the new music Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and others were playing in Harlem in the 1940s, writing that "these players rained musical, political, sartorial, chemical and attitudinal changes, in different proportions for everybody who encountered them." He also tells us about the night Davis met Parker onstage at Chicago's Argyle Show Bar, when Parker was so high he staggered offstage to urinate in a phone booth. Gossip and hyperbole aside, Leland's most interesting argument for the primacy of jazz concerns the way the music bends and reshapes time to its needs. Discussing jazz's influence on cartoons, he writes, "In the 1920s and 1930s, as animation was finding its stride, jazz was blossoming as the sound of American urban modernism. Jazz splintered time into discontinuous fragments, beginning it anew with each rhythmic return. Cartoons frolicked with the shards." True hipsters, Leland writes, seek "grace in the imperfections of the present." Jazz-lover Jack Kerouac took Thelonious Monk's edict of "no revisions" to mean striving for a "jewel center of subject of interest at moment of writing," while Allen Ginsberg described his poem "Howl" as a "jazz mass." (Monk, hearing Ginsberg's impassioned nonsequiturs, apparently nodded and said "makes sense.") Decades later, DJs such as Grandmaster Flash, who innovated the seamless musical loop, "could freeze the music in this moment of transition," locating it "perpetually on the road" in the exact same way "a jazz performance does not move toward a goal or tell a linear story." Referencing the anecdote about Parker, so high at the Argyle that he fell asleep on the bandstand, Leland writes, "You can wake up in any part of a jazz piece without needing to know what came before; what matters is the flow of the present moment." Looked at this way, it does all make a sort of sense, or at least more sense than any definitions of hip having to do with wearing (or, more accurately, refusing to be caught dead in) a trucker hat. If hip is found in Emerson's nonconformity and the Beats' slack Zen and the Internet's alternate reality, the soundtrack to all of these nonlinear, nontraditional philosophies might be the "stop-time" of jazz, wherein Coltrane "could juggle a beat for 24 bars or 24 minutes." It's hard to imagine advertising execs thinking an Ornette Coleman jazz solo with a complicated time signature and no catchy chorus will sell many sneakers, though, which may explain both why the music has resisted commercial co-optation and why it no longer has the cultural currency it once did. In one of the book's most interesting chapters, titled " 'It's Like Punk Rock, But a Car': Hip Sells Out," Leland discusses the commoditization of hip. He goes beyond easy formulations like hip + the marketplace = square, arguing that commerce and hipness share a relationship of mutual exploitation. While the Gap's appropriating Jack Kerouac's image (and airbrushing his cigarette) to sell khakis is just sad, Volkswagen's borrowing of Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" turned a whole new generation on to the little-known singer, and in the end, probably sold more Nick Drake records than Volkswagens, which can't be entirely bad. Jennie Yabroff is a writer living in New York City.

http://f.chtah.com/i/9/276579820/BXCoupon_1020.htm 20% thru 30 October

As I think more about quoting, I feel like there are quotes inserted with a pair of tweezers (good) and quotes inserted with a sledge hammer (not so good). There are spontaneous quotes and quotes planned out well in advance. There are sly quotes and no-brainer quotes (Whispering on Groovin' High or What is This Thing on Hot House - hope I got those derivatives correct). Okay, I'm rambling. Shut up, BeBop.

Like so many things, the practice of quoting has lost its appeal to me over the years - both as I've aged, and as the practice has become more used (in the cumulative sense: the first quote probably would have struck me as clever; by the five millionth...) One example sticks out in my mind (though I don't have the recording here to provide details) is that of the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band at the Village Vanguard (part of the Mosaic set, methinks, though I still inhabit vinyl world) with Mulligan and Clark Terry trading quotes of mostly geographical theme (Chicago, Way Down Yonder in New Orleans, Indiana, Broadway...) on Blueport, I think it was. (Sorry for the sketchiness on all of this.) Cute, if not planned in advance. Well executed at tempo.

Can anyone help with Vol 2?

I collect saxophone reeds that play well. So far, I don't have any.

Wonderful Cat. One of the nicest guys I ever had the pleasure to know. And a guy I thought would go on forever, even when his health was failing. RIP, Vernon.

Cecil McBee – site plus three forum sales = specific jurisdiction Cecil McBee, plaintiff, is a jazz musician who lives in Maine and has played in Japan. Defendant is a Japanese company. Jazz is popular in Japan, so popular, apparently, that defendant is able to maintain retail shops throughout Japan called “Cecil McBee” that sell a line of women’s clothing called “Cecil McBee.” Defendant operates a website at http://www.cecilmcbee.net that enables “the exchange of information although not accepting orders directly, and enabl[es] the viewer to purchase products from any one of many stores listed on the site.” Although the site’s homepage contains the English phrase “Cecil McBee” in emphatic lettering, the site’s content is written primarily in Japanese. Defendant has (somehow) made three sales to Maine residents and shipped the goods sold to Maine. Magistrate Judge Cohen held these contacts sufficient to exercise specific jurisdiction under the Constitution. In doing so, he applied the “sliding scale” test, found that defendant’s website was neither active nor interactive, and opined that courts usually apply the sliding scale test to determine whether general jurisdiction exists. Judge Cohen also cited a 1997 case, DEC v. Alta Vista for the proposition that “when a website that itself used the trademark in dispute would plainly attract residents of the forum state and the owner of the website knows that the plaintiff is located in that state, the purposeful availment prong of the test is met.”

Check it out: http://www.delica.jp/brand/brand05.html

Cecil McBee Discovers He Is a Chain The Cecil McBee clothing chain has become the vanguard of a current Japanese fashion craze called "erogance" -- a melding of "erotic" and "elegant" styles. An American jazz musician says the stores have cost him bookings and damaged his career. Unfortunately, the article is only online for subscribers. In summary, the article is about having his name appropriated by some Japanese fashion stores. I saw the same article (virtually) somewhere else not too long ago.

Can't find track listings for these two CDs. Would appreciate any help. Don't need dates or personnel...I don't think I do anyway

Steve Reynolds. How 'bout that. Welcome. Just curious, what's 90% tenor? (10% playing something else? 10% not playing at all? Some Roland Kirk invention?) Personally, I play about 28% tenor.

Jazz, tubes and vinyl (and conrad-johnson) are always welcome 'round here! I'm enjoying my last day in the States with my PV2-Ar, MV75A, Sota Star Sapphire, three boxes of Franklin Mint recordings (Saxophone Stylists, Cool Jazz, Ellington) and a tall heap of individual LPs. This will have to hold me until April. Anyway, WELCOME!

http://f.chtah.com/i/9/276579820/btmcoupon.htm 20% off one item (w/exceptions) through 4 October.

I respectfully withdraw whatever question or comment prompted the conversation to turn to Mr. W. Marsalis. Define 'swing', I suppose? I didn't catch the PBS series on jazz with the aforementioned Mr. M, but, based on comments I've read, I suspect this definition may have been a big part of his 'contributions'.

By the way, would anyone care to attempt a defintion?

When I was growing up with jazz, we often spoke of swing. In fact, we probably spoke of this jazz element more than any other. At the time, we debated whether it was an essential element of jazz and we debated who swung and who didn't. (Cecil Taylor? Albert Ayler? Paul Quinichette?) I hang out on these board from time to time, and try to catch a representative sample of the threads (excepting Politics). I don't see much about the fundamental question: does it swing? So, who swings? Clark Terry? Harry Edison? Zoot Sims? What swings? The Basie Band? And is it essential?

Are you a secret agent? B-) Peace Corps would be closer...

<<Bebop -- I can't imagine travelling anywhere without my MP3 (hard drive) player, and a good pair of noise cancelling headphones>> Unfortunately, where I go, I can't carry anything of value, even if I'm willing to surrender it to would-be theives or customs/immigration officials. Things of value just attract too much attention when one is 'off the beaten path'. Rental car? No such thing in my neck of the woods. Hopefully, things will change one day...someday before I retire. For now, I get my kicks from hearing the music of the world, performed on the world stage.

Ah, the quintessenttial question of my life. I've got a heap of recordings (somewhere in the five figures), but travel 365 days a year WITHOUT ANY OF THEM. They are stored near an airport that I use as a hub. When I pass through town on an overnight - never longer - I'll snatch a few from storage and take them back to my hotel. But I seldom manage to listen to more than three or four before I have to return them before my flight out. I hope like heck there's no one else out there in my situation.

Tempting, tempting, tempting...

Enough that I quit buying years ago.

Amen. One of my favorite recordings. I should add, 'at least in its Time/Bainbridge incarnation.

All this money spent designing new nickels. Well, at least it's not on my dime.

Actually, a few interesting things... Lee Morgan - Live at the Lighthouse Freddie Redd - Redd's Blues (Conn) Kenny Burrell - Blue Lights Chick Corea - "IS Sessions" Freddie Hubbard - Night of the Cookers (RVG) didn't this just come out?