JSngry

Ah, Belford Hendricks, a man of many talents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belford_Hendricks Too bad about that "Ramblin' Rose" thing, though. But I'll take it over "Lazy Hazy Crazy Days Of Summer", if forced to choose, and I'll put up a lethal fight to keep from being forced to.

WHOA now! If I'm reading you right, you seem to think that by me acknowledging the presence of "unsavory" characters in the music world and confronting the very real need to "deal with them" at some point in some way (cf Duvivier & Goodman & damn near anybody with Mingus until, like, the near-end) if one is to have a sustainable career that I am somehow justifying, or even worse, excusing the unsavory behavior. No such thing, I assure you. Bad be=havior is bad behavior, criminal acts are criminal acts, and assholes are assholes. Period. As I've maintained from the beginning, music (or "art" in general) is the message, musicians simply the deliverers of the message. You can have the same telegram delivered to your door by an exemplary citizen as you can by a total reprobate. One you might want to invite inside for some iced tea, the other you might want to sick your bulldog on, but either way, the telegram gets delivered, which, at the end of the day, is what the sender of the telegram hoped for. Of course it's better for everybody when the messenger is a Great Person, but, hey, life don't always roll out that way, so, uh.... be prepared, don't say you weren't warned, and don't be surprised. Shit does indeed happen, so watch your step lest you step in it. And speaking of shit, I do sense that there is (and always has been) a strain of thought that passionately wishes for the shitless defecation. Good luck on that one!

Totally.

I guess one person's "confrontational" is another person's "here's what I think about it". I guess you've figured out by now that I'm not bashful about expressing myself but it really is just my opinions/feelings/whatever, and in no way do I feel that I'm "right" in any sense other than "this is where life has led me, this is the prism through which I see things". If I do not surrender that willingly or easily, it's not because I think that anybody else is "wrong", it's just that their "right" is not my "right", and just as I would not expect anybody else to believe something without a reason, I don't expect myself to either. But that's not to say that what's not a particularly compelling reason for me is not a perfectly legitimate and deeply compelling reason for somebody else. There's 10,000,000 stories in the Naked City, and once you put clothes on everybody, that number increases exponentially! So hey, you wanna argue about that now? (JUST KIDDING!!!!)

Sorry, I wasn't attempting to "debate", merely discuss. Maybe it's one of those "personal style" things coupled with the impersonality of the written forum that makes it seem so? Disappear if you must, and sorry if it seems that the "tone" has changed, but maybe, uh....consider not shrinking away once in a while, ok? You certainly have nothing to back down from and plenty to stand up for!

Absolutely agree. But I suspect that "art" and treating people well are not really intrinsically connected either (and centuries of human history would seem to bolster that suspicion). Of course it's always better when they do, just that they don't always, nor do they "have" to. It can be a m-f to work through sometimes, believe me, I know. But in the end, it is what it is, whatever it ends up being.

You say that as if "genius" is something you get to choose. Do you really believe that? And what about being a genius who isn't cruel and abusive to others, wouldn't that be a fun choice? Or what about a genius who begins as cruel and abusive to others but grows into being a kind loving person, wouldn't that be something to look forward to? But you know what really sucks? So-so musicians who are cruel and abusive to others. In some languages they are referred to as "agents". Of course, there's such an air of....finality to your assertion, a sense that once one "chooses" that the die is cast and that personal evolution, improved musicianship, and just flat out all-around salvation are no longer ongoing possibilities that I have to think that what you said might not be what you mean, exactly.

Well, that's the thing - the profession of music leads one into areas of ambiguity that just the "appreciation" of it doesn't. Nor does being a "student" prepare one for the realities of The Real World Of Music. One may in fact have aspirations to become a professional only to find out that one is more comfortable with one's self not going there once one discovers all the... stuff" that is to be found there no matter how much one tries to avoid it. In that, it is no different than any other profession, but it is different in that unlike, say, accounting, there is often a deep-seated passion, a love in the deepest sense, of what one also is hoping to make a living at (accountants, correct me if I'm wrong about this). And as with any love, one has to find it in one's self to forgive/overlook/whatever some things in some people at some times in order to keep the love alive, even if it means alive in a less "pure" (some would say "idealistic", others still, "naive") state than how it started out. Ironically (or not), it's the purity of that original vision that keeps us going, the sense that no matter how much trampling of it and shitting on it life does (including that which we ourselves do), that somewhere there remains a piece of it that remains untouched. The reality for some, though, may be that such a place no longer exists, wither temporarily, or, worst case, permanently. That must be the darkest of dark places to be, to feel/be convinced that there is no more love to be had in one's life, ever. But its a reality that needs to be confronted, if only to scare you shitless about letting it happen to you. Because you don't know what love is until you know the meaning of the blues.

Nice article. Thanks for posting!

Now, it might well be that I say that after I have the gig for a while. But if I'm a As Serious As Your Life musician, and assuming that there's no musical reasons for not doing so, to turn down that gig at that time for that reason strikes me as cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Or to put it another way - encouraging poor behavior is not the same as not discouraging it in those for whom it is already present & perhaps/probably irrevocable. All the attempted guilt-trip slinging of "enabling" ignores the fact that if all it took to eliminate bad behavior was to "discourage" it, hey, we'd be living in paradise a long time ago. The best advice I can offer a young musician is this - know what it is in music that really matters to you and go after it relentlessly, know what it is about being human that really matters to you and hold on to it unyieldingly, and never, never close your eyes to the fact that those are anything other two totally different things that will diverge at least as often as they intersect.

Yeah, ok, so it's 1968, I was born a lot earlier than I was, and I get a call from Miles offering me the gig. "Sorry Miles, you're an asshole. Find somebody else." Yeah, right. A life without ambiguity is a life without life.

Well, I mean, I'm not immune by any means. I spent years not digging Stan Kenton for all the Great White Hope bullshit that he perpetrated/collaborated/instigated/etced. But I finally realized that, hey, ok, there was some good music there any ways, not enough to make me rethink the validity of the Great White hope nonsense or anything, but enough to say, ok, whatever, that's likable enough, or in Graettinger's case, WOW!!! WTF?!?!? enough, and the rest of it, hey, oh well, I don't need an extra-musical reason to not like it, I just don't, period. It's not good music to/for me, period.

Prolonged virginity can make shit get really weird, doncha' know...

Yeah, my bad on that one. Sorry.

Ralph Carmichael? The charts served the purpose, and even worse, the material. Skills like a mo, but... Gordon Jenkins? Hard to go there all the way, because when he was bad, which was usually for me, he was... unbelievably overwrought, about 1000 mile high and a centimeter deep, but when he was good, and sometimes he was, it was still the same, only meaningful, and anybody who can pull that trick of is somebody for whom I have the same type respect I have for a professional thief who never gets caught. Either way, he had his zone, and it was his zone, if only because nobody else would dare to venture there for reasons aplenty. And, OOPS, in spite of those dreadful tentacles of treacle, the Cole/Jenkins sides are amongst Nat's best pop singing. Go figure, if you can. I can't.

Yeah, all right! Most of this discussion has been focused on the noble but ultimately luxury task of determining how we're going to let ourselves feel about listening to music, often by some dead folks, years after it's been made, and yeah, we've somehow allowed ourselves the conceit that somehow that matters, which outside of our own self-contained universe, it doesn't, Michael Jackson, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jim Keltner, et al notwithstanding. Dead folks have done did what they do, ya' know? Where it really matters, and where the ambiguity reaches you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it levels is when you actually have to decide whether or not to work for and/or with some of these "characters", whether or not you're gonna hire somebody because what they bring to the gig is worth more to you than what they may or may not do before and afterwards, and the same for taking somebody else's money, somebody who's a borderline fascist and whose mere presence on Earth makes you queasy, but the cat's got a gig paying the money that you need right now, so what then? Or what about taking money from a club that's an obvious mob front, or maybe even less than a front, where crackheads come in with all kinds of illicit goods (including produce!) and leave with a rock, that's pretty slimy right there, but again, that club got the money you need right now and nobody else is offering it that night, maybe even that week, so if you listen to a really badass Miles side on the way to that gig, what, are you double dooming your soul to eternal damnation that way? Those of you who can spend more than a quick minute worrying over whether enjoying records good music made by bad - but often dead! - people will forevermore affect your karma to the point of permanent taintation of the soul,, hey, I envy you. Or maybe not.

Don't have/haven't heard the Horo, alas. so I don't know.

Yeah. speaking of Black Saint, since that label's kinda not been readily/easily available for a while now, some of our younger viewers might not be aware of this masterpiece:

Finally got around to giving this a good listen, and truthfully, I have no problems with any of it. Definitely like the more "meandering" stuff than the "straight ahead" pieces though. Those things seem to be the most natural. In the end, neither fish nor fowl, but certainly neither fishy nor foul either, not by a long shot. Never predictable, and never less than interesting. If this is the worst new release I hear this year, hey, life's done gone & gotten a helluva lot better when I wasn't looking.

And here's the Aurora logo I remember:

I tried to build Frankenstein when I was 8 but screwed up the paint work. That was 1963. How long were those thigs around anyway?

Some MPS albums were readily available in the US for at least the first half - 3/4 of the 70s. Distribution was originally by BASF, and then by...I forget who. I remember at least so me of these albums as having a seemingly Stevie Wonder influence. Would this be accurate? And how much Zappa influence is there? The less the better for me, not that IP don't dig Zappa, just that for my taste he's...best in his own realm. What I'd really like to hear is that these albums have a rich harmonic palate and are rife with colorful keyboard textures. Then they might have me for a buy.

I think he meant that Wayne was just "crazy", and that's far from a unique observation. I just wish I could be that kind of crazy...