JSngry

That's one of the more amazing Warne Marsh performances on record...and there are many...which is to say some of the best 20th Century music on record.. And Lee is in damn fine form too. Not having a chordal instrument freed these guys up in all kinds of ways, and there's really not that much of it on record. Just..superior music in every regard, and I mean that as absolutely as I'll ever mean it about anything.

Ok, technically that would be A&M.

Sure it does. In 1963, Cecil & Ornette had already been around long enough to have made an impact past being "novelties", Albert Ayler's name was beginning to get out there (and his music heard a little), Trane & Elvin were really beginning to get in gear, lots of things that had been fermenting were starting to come to the surface, none of which had too much to do with putting on a suit & tie, running the changes with a "bluesy" virtuosity, and saying "We sincerely hope you do enjoy". And that's just in the music... You gotta remember, Baraka was a "radical", musically and socially. His patience for the status quo was next to nil, and having real, viable options at hand just made it more so. No, I don't think the timing explains it. Sorry. If Blues People had been written in 1959 I think he would have been just as dismissive of the genre. Even before the free jazz era, Baraka was looking for musical rebels, and the hard boppers definitely weren't that. Sorry, but read his 1959 essay about his homeboy Wayne Shorter in Black Music. or, in the same book, his near-ecstatic review of the Monk/Rouse/Warren/Dunlop group. For that matter, read the book in chronological, rather than as-published, order. From 1959 to 1967, the "militancy" makes almost exponential leaps, as it did in the real world. Now, you can say that neither Monk nor Shorter were ever typical "hard bop", and that is correct. But that also goes to the point that Jones' discomfort was not so much with the music of Hard Bop as it was the relative lack of truly original thinking in most of that music, not the basic stylistic elements of it. And that lack was much more glaring in 1963 than it was in 1959. The jazz "landscape" in 1963 was quite different than it was in 1959. Hell, in 1959, Cecil was still playing "tunes" for the most part, Ornette had just come to New York, and Trane had just begun to look at modal playing (and that thanks to Miles - Trane was still very much into changes and all their permutations). If you were going to look for "rebels" in the jazz world of 1959, it would have been in the general milieu of Hard Bop (or else in a few other places that were not relevant to LeRoi Jones' world). Where else and what else where the hip players playing? But in 1963...whole 'nother world. Fundamentally, profoundly different. And truthfully, I don't even know if LeRoi Jones even writes Blues People in 1959. I don't know if his mind is even in that place yet. Think about that!

Also worth remembering - there was no equivalent of "LeRoi Jones" during The Bebop Revolution. One can only imagine what might have been written if there had been... As well as what kind of world it would have been where "such a thing" existed therein. Certainly would not have been The World As It Was. that's for sure.

Sure it does. In 1963, Cecil & Ornette had already been around long enough to have made an impact past being "novelties", Albert Ayler's name was beginning to get out there (and his music heard a little), Trane & Elvin were really beginning to get in gear, lots of things that had been fermenting were starting to come to the surface, none of which had too much to do with putting on a suit & tie, running the changes with a "bluesy" virtuosity, and saying "We sincerely hope you do enjoy". And that's just in the music... You gotta remember, Baraka was a "radical", musically and socially. His patience for the status quo was next to nil, and having real, viable options at hand just made it more so.

Despair not: http://www.organissi...-at-newport-63/ The link in the first post is still live. http://www.archive.o...Live-Newport-63

Well, it's not a joke - depending on what you wanted out of music (and life) Hard bop by 1961 or so was either a comfortable expression where you good go to feel good, or a hopeless dead end where the inevitable outcome was just playing the same thing, no matter how many twists you could put on it. Whichever one suits you best is the "truth" for you. There's no empirical proof that one is true and the other not. And also, Hard Bop in 1965 as a totally different social proposition than it was in 1955. In between, a lot of things happened. If you're looking for justification of your own tastes, don't bother. They're not needed. Nor is a "defense" of Hard Bop. But not needing a defense is not the same as being immune to valid criticism and challenges, unless questioning is perceived to be the same as attacking. And if you're looking for provable answers to linear questions, stay away from jazz and work algebra problems instead!

In the neighborhood, anyway...

Are you ready to accept the possibility that perhaps both POVs are correct?

I think it fair to say that Lee Morgan Hard Bop & Wynton Marsalis Hard Bop are two totally different musics reflecting two totally different worlds.

A sad loss indeed. Red Holloway was a BAAAAAAAAD man.

All of which is to say that although Baraka's voice is an important one (and an especially so in the time of the most recent revolutionary time in jazz), he himself is far from infallible. His Karma has quite often ran over his Dogma! But if you want to get a sense of how history felt as it was unfolding, and not just settle for a "looking back" POV written from the perspective of "now that it's all over..."(which will just as often as not have every bit as much of an agenda a Baraka did then), then hey - you got to read him.

Same thing with me and the funky (as opposed to "straight ahead") organ groups of the late-50s/early 70s. I thought that music was a cop out in terms of "revolutionary" goals, that it was playing to stereotypes. The I came to realize that one of the maxims of the macrobiotic philosphy very much applied here, namely, the bigger the front, the bigger the back. The fact that I, a revo;tuion-minded white guy, didn't "get" the Leon Spencers/etc of the world right away only pointed out how out of touch I was with "the community", not the other way around. I was projecting my vales onto something that was not intrinsically mine, the very thing I was claiming to be so much against. I was a freakin' clueless hypocrite myself. That was a big lesson learned, right there, and a hard one! Which is just to say that something as deeply rooted in "the community" as a Leon Spencer album was the physical flip-side to Albert Ayler's or Cecil Taylor's splitting-of-the-atom of that same community. Yin (upwards into the heavens /Yang (downwards into the earth), two sides of the same coin, the more Yin the Yin got, it would only be natural that the Yang would follow suit. And vice-versa. Of course, these are all what happens naturally. The more "interference" which occurs, the more weird things get. But you can only postpone the inevitable, you can never prevent it. And that's when dogma becomes bullshit, when somebody/anybody considers Lockjaw a status-quo kind of player. Lockjaw was a Tenor Terrorist. Believe it!

That's interesting. Could you explain what "full victory" would have amounted to in that analogy? Is there an assumption that somehow the "promise" of bop was never really actualized or that Hard Boppers are somehow responsible for what one might see as the "arrested development" (as it were) of that realization? "Full victory" would have come in a shedding of all "programmed" notions of time, place, self, etc., musically and otherwise. Full self-realization as free, independent beings in nobody's image but your own. Music would be an act of full self-realization, not shwing up to a job and executing a pre-determined style, no matter how flexible the boundaries. Of course, this all has to be seen through the lens of Black Liberation/Nationalism as well. Hard bop was perceived by some as not moving ahead but settling in, and it was in no way time to settle in just yet. In a way, it's all very Utopian and of its time. But in another way, it's an eternal proposition, not just in music, and not just culturally specific. Who are you? Whose life are you living? What are your goals, and what is your place in the world? And who's decided all this? The easy answers are seldom the correct ones, and it's not until you've answered the hard questions with the hard answers that "moving on" has validity as anything other than ceaselessness and/or a cop-out. This was all very much in the air at the time, far less so today. But it's inevitable that at some point it will come back around, because it always does, because although most people are accomodationalists, not revolutionaries, and accommodation only works up to a point.

I definitely intend to. I loved reading this piece, regardless of my reaction to it. You should also read Jones/Baraka's Black Music - a collection of essays/record reviews/etc between 1959-1967. It's about as real-time a written look at the changes in jazz going on at that time as is out there. You think he was tough on Hard Bop in Blues People...let's put it this way - if you were alive at the time and had a revolutionary spirit, who would you look at as relevant to your life - Donald Byrd or Albert Ayler? Remember, we're not talking about today, we're talking about right then, right there.

Remember when the book was written.

Baraka is probably coming from the "bop was the revolution, Hard Bop the accommodation that was willing to end the revolution before full victory had been won" POV. Can't say that he's wrong about that, nor can I say that there were some very pleasant and meaninful accomodations made along the way. The truth is that most people are more prone to being accomodationalists than they are revolutionaries. Enjoy your revoltuions when you have them, becasue they won't last forever. You should read the whole book, though, from the beginning. It's important, and needs to be seriously considered.

$50 for the set as described, easy. $60 if the dubbed in airplane noise gets its own track. I've had the original LP since 1971. I need that airplane noise.

Love that story about high school! If you've not seen this, enjoy!

Did anybody bother to ask him what he's doing for the rest of his life?

Maybe the info was bad, but the earlier bit about the samples being split to protect against false positives was reported by whoever it was who was "on top" of this story while it was hot. If that wasn't followed, then that's a problem for MLB. If it was followed for the second sample, then that's a problem for Braun. And if there's any ambiguity at all in the process, or even in this one case, then that's bad for everybody. Even worse is if there actually is no ambiguity, but everybody agreed to ahem their way out of it. Honestly, I don't think MLB is going to push too hard on this one, having finally escaped the Steroid Stigma. I think they're more than willing to let this one go for now - popular player, small market team, etc. What will go on behind the scenes, I don't know, and neither will most of us. But woe be him who gets caught at the wrong time being the wrong player on the wrong team. Cumulative wrath will definitely be hurled, I'm sure. Just...come up with a tight process and enforce it absolutely. Take it to court if you have to. But until then, if there's wiggle room, wiggling will be done, bet on it.

Wow. What an asshole. So should the baseball writers take away Braun's 2011 MVP award?? My gut says yes, but I wonder if doing so that it would create more of a problem then already exists. I'm also hearing that the testing process mandates splitting a sample in two and then take testing each half separately to protect against a false positive, and that Braun's other half came back negative. If this is true, ESPN reported prematurely and extremely irresponsibly. Point of clarification - The sample in question wasn't from the first test - it was from Braun's 2nd test. The first test had a result of 20-1 testosterone level which triggered a need for the 2nd test. According to ESPN the 2nd sample was tested and it too came back positive for testosterone. Although MLB officials would not comment on the record, sources say they are still convinced that the sample tested came from Braun, and that the positive test result was correct. They emphasize that the FedEx package that arrived in the Montreal laboratory was sealed three times with tamper-proof seals: one on the box, one on a plastic bag inside the box and again on the vial that contained the urine. The lab chief, an MLB source told ESPN.com, testified that the urine was not tainted, that it was appropriate for testing and that it tested positive for testosterone. http://espn.go.com/e...lb-drug-testing What's also interesting is that in his appeal to the arbitrator Braun's lawyers didn't argue that the sample had been contaminated or that the test result was a false positive. They just argued that protocol hadn't been strictly followed. Not sure if splitting one sample in half and taking two separate samples are the same thing, but it does look bad for Braun that both came back positive, assuming that the second one was split. Still, rules is rules, and if the enforcers of the rules cannot follow their own rules, they too must face consequences.