JSngry

Damn, I cringe beyond description hearing this... Best wishes indeed, and then some.

Day Two of listening rewards itself with hearing this mostly marvelous music. Recommended, even for (most of) the skeptics.

How many 5th Beatles were there anyway?

Add "at the right time in musical/cultural history" and you got a deal!

I have bouught & listened to the Road Shows. I enjoy it very the much & would heartily offer endorsement and recommendations to all of my friends, real and other wise.

When I say that "it just works out that way", I mean as far as what breaks through and makes its "revolutionary" mark, not to the work itself. Although ultimately, "it just works out that way" might happen (very little, if anything creative is accomplished by trying to be creative, if you know what I mean), it won't just work out that way without a lot of work being done to get ready to be in that place at that time.

In the end, yeah. I think it does. And by the time you think you might have figured out why (when what you've probably really figured out is why it matters to you that it happened), something else has happened. And so it goes. Lather, rinse, repeat. Everything I needed to know, I learned from a shampoo bottle.

Konitz, not really. It's a throwback to Mingus' early 50s Tristano-ist phase in general & their 1951 Debut session in particular!

It was time for it to happen, so it did. As to why them, hey, who knows? Why Trane, McCoy, Garrison, & Elvin? Evolution does what it will do when it needs to do it through whom it will be done. Trying to figure out the mechanics of it all is not nearly as important (and may not even be important...) as recognizing it for what it is and responding accordingly. It's just a hunch on my part, but I suspect that the main purpose of life is not to give historians something to do with their time...

I hear ya'. I'm not trying to "kill" my past, couldn't even if i wanted to. Just making sure that it doesn't take up real estate that might yet be developed, that's all. And when there's no more of that to be had, hey, it's time to die, no problem. Nothing sadder (to me, anyway) than not being able to find anything in the here & now worth getting engaged in. I really would rather be dead, seriously. Later than I'd have liked, I realize that the key to having a good tomorrow is to not fuck up today any more than you can keep from fucking it up. It seems obvious now, but....

Fair questions all. In order: Can't there be a value in understanding better the origins and nature of the blues separate from any desire to "take personal ownership of the past to better take ownership of the present?" Sure, I suppose so. That's a personal thing if ever there was one. I'm just saying that "finding" history this far from the reality is inevitably going to be an incomplete affair, and blanks will equally inevitably be filled in far more often than not. When things start getting subjective like that, "agendas" by necessity come into play. Nothing necessarily malevolent about it, either. The thing is, tough, why would you want to discover the undiscoverable if not to "own" it? Again, nothing intrinsically malevolent about that, not at all, it's often healthy, in fact, but mythologies inevitably spring up, which is why we have "religion" far more often than we have "god", and frankly, in so (too?) much American music "blues" has become "religion". So where's "god"? Not in the "history", I don't believe. But that's just me. In fact, I would say that questions about the origins of the blues and the relationship between blues and classic jazz are becoming increasing irrelevant for understanding what is going on in music today. I would say exactly the same thing as well, and for many different reasons. On the other hand, for those of us who believe that the 20th musical century was the "blue century," a better understanding of the blues seems highly worthwhile in and of itself: a better understanding of the past for more meaningful appreciation of the past. I'm of quite mixed feelings about this one, actually, if for no other reason than that too often, imo, "understanding" one's past too easily turns into nostalgia and/or self-congratulation. Yuck. But then again, there's always "revisionists" who try to convince us that everything we know is wrong, especially that which we saw firsthand. Yuck again. What I think needs to be understood is that when Africa came to America, the commonly understood/accepted time/space parameters (i.e. - "reality") I mentioned earlier were in one place, and now they are in another altogether, and not just in music either. If there was indeed a "cultural battle", Africa has won it, hands down. Not by domination, but by insinuation. Hell, the notion of "digital reality" as it pertains to time, space, and place is nothing if not the "African" sense of omniversiality beginning to be realized by simple technological evolution. Digital = Africa For Dummies? You tell me! Seriously, for me (and I stress, just for me, this is entirely personal), "looking back" can only get you so far, because after a while, you do gotta fill in some blanks by yoursel, and then it's no longer history, but specualtion based in history. Now, the future is pretty much all blanks, but unlike the past, it's someplace you can/will actually go to, at least as long as you're alive. Lord knows, I value knowledge and understanding, and you can't have that w/o knowing the past and knowing it well, but at some point (and it's a point I've reached myself al ot over the last few years), it's like...why you wanna keep on making up this specualtion based in history behind you when you can have a real reality in front of you? Then again, that's just me.

If you are old enough amd/or geeky enough to get the vibe, that's a damn funny record!

If it's any indication of where I'm at now (and if it matters, which it surely doesn't...), "songs" are now a necessary evil that are simultaneously becoming less necessary and less evil.

yeah?

Hey, to claim that blues is "African" music is just absurd. Really. What I wonder about though, is the attempts (and since I really don't follow the "critical controversy" too much, I can't/won't claim anybody's motives) to make blues into some sort of "hybrid" music in its "essence", which I think is way off-base unless one equates form entirely with function. OTOH, we all project our own needs onto what we perceive as being "essence", so that's going to be a ball that never stops rolling, and an argument that is never settled.

I realize that that previous post might come across with a dismissive tone, which is certainly not my intent. It's just that for me, at this point, "impetus" would be analogous to "god" & "mechanisms" to "religion". Religion, of course, is an important definer of any civilization, but for me, at this point, I understand it well enough (through my own lens, anyway) to just not find it all that important anymore. "god", otoh.... hey, that;s another matter. An exaggerated analogy, perhaps, but perhaps not. I guess it all comes down to people looking for what they need to find, for whatever reason they need to find it. It's all good like that, I suppose.

Oh, so this is basically a dissection of "songwriting" then, rather than "impetus", the roads built for the car rather than the car itself. Enjoy, if that's you thing.

Are we seriously entertaining the notion that white songwriters just all of a sudden started writing "blues" songs out of some random impulse & that black performers said, "hey, I like that, wish I'd thought of it!"? Or are we seriously defining "blues" only as a song form, outside of & wholly apart from its function? I mean, yeah, the cross-cultural pollination is inevitable, it's the story of America, really, but c'mon...

There is no past beyond a successions of presents that we have handled one way or the other. The only way that the past keeps happening over and over is if we do not take control of the present to make it otherwise. Easier said than done, and sometimes only possible in theory (and always easier individually than collectively), but hey...

Function, sir, function. All the architectural observations that can be mustered are so much so much if one doesn't discern what to what use they are being put. And then, form explains function instead of form creating function. As for "original practices" & "origins", how far back are we going anyway? 19th century? 18th? Earlier? And where? Just America? Africa? Cuba? Haiti? And if the answer is "we can only go back as far as we have documentation", Wellsir, there you are. Forms then really have no meaning apart from function. And although function is no more traceable than form after a while, I think it's safe to say that more people have music as a functional accessory than they do as anything else, so it's my hunch that form is in the service of funtion for anything that's more than an "exercise". Although, really, this is all besides the point. It really ain't either/or & it ain't one or the other. It's all one. "Deconstruction" has been a clever parlor game of sorts for a few decades now (and occasionally more than that) but really, "vertical", "horizontal", "diagonal", what the fuck ever, it really doesn't matter. It really doesn't. People do what they do for the reasons they need to do it. And if they need to break it down in order to be able to see it in terms they can rationalize, ok. But it was there before, and it'll be there after, and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It's the shit that can't be seen that makes people want to see it in the first place. Oh, the irony...

Or maybe you could say that Bird was so thoroughly evolved that there was a holistic unity to his work, a unity such that "horizontal", "vertical", etc. ceased to exist unless one needs to seem them that way, when it would appear that he himself did not have that need...

--then it's mostly a description of rhythmic phrasing, no? Which is what confuses, since "vertical" is often used to refer to harmony, versus "horizontal" to refer to line and melody. With regard to the blues, you said that you think jazz players play horizontally whereas the blues is vertical, which, going by your definition above, would mean jazz players are more metronomic. Are you thinking of jazz players stringing together long lines of eighth-notes, whereas blues players have more idiosyncratic phrasing? Ok, I remember that now...totally non-traditional, contrarian, actually, definitions of horizontal & vertical as it pertains to Young v. Hawkins, but oh well, why not... Anyway... My problem with this whole line of thought is that at face value it seems to be missing the point of the creation of an altogether new time/space paradigm(s) (you can call it a new reality if you like, although with that comes many more factors, essential and otherwise, but hey, any reality begins and ends with a consensual (although not necessarily conscious) acceptance of a time/space paradigm of more or less set parameters) as being what is to me at the core of the African/American collisions/collusions under consideration. "Vertical" & "horizontal" are relevant but not essential to this ongoing creation, since in this game, they have both been under negotiation from the git-go. Perhaps also worth noting is that arguing/exploring/questioning/attempting to discover the point might be fun, but it's probably moot by now... I'm beginning to think that "we" (as in all or almost all of us) try to get our own personal ownership on the past in order to better take ownership of the present, which is ok, and all, since the classics never go out of style, but an ever-growing part of me wonders what would happen if we let the past be the past and instead of trying to own the present, just own nothing more than ourselves. I can see that one going either way, but geez, everybody's got a story, ya' know, and if somebody's right then somebody's wrong, and boy howdy, we just can't let wrong go unrighted, even if at this point nobody really knows which is purely which (ain't never been nobody who was really there, not considering how many different theres there were and for how many different peoples they existed, and even then, none of them were the reality, which ought to be pretty obvious but seldom is, it seems...) and in the meantime, there's life to be lived right now... But maybe not. I'm just saying that as nice as "heritage" is, it's ultimately just a place to be from on the way to someplace else, and unless you believe in empires and shit, sooner or later "heritage" threatens to become a crutch rather than a launcher. Sooner or later. We all move at different speeds. But dammit, when you do get there, go there! Evolve or die, etc.

Dude, what the fuck are you talking about? Seriously. Some new definitions of vertical & horizontal? I don't know if I agree with you or not, because I don't understand what it is I may or may not be agreeing with.

You're saying that you & Wynton disagreed? Wow, I sure didn't see that one coming!