JSngry

Like the song says, to everything there is a seasoning...

I astarted teh thread on the Greer, so you know it's good w/me. And I really dig the Anna King thing as well.

Don't drink or smoke anymore, don't have a fantasy team, and I kinda like to let it linger rather than shake it off, but believe me when I tell you that I've been laughing my ass of at this whole thing, including my part in it, and especially the predictability of who's gonna show up and say what about what. It's reassuring, man, reassuring!

It's part of the Natural Cycle Of CyberJazz Dysfunctionality - BNBB Angst, Wynton Rage, "Why Isn't Jazz More Popular", "What Is Jazz", and a few other Dearly Beloveds, they mark the changing of the seasons and let us know that no matter what else happens, we'll always have these. Like the blowing of tommy sands through an hourglass, these are the daze of our lifestyles. And resistance is futile.

"misguided members", "big spots", "expulsion", damn, this place really is phallocentric!

SYNERGY!!!

Wouldn't it be cool if this thread becomes subject of another article that gets published years after the fact and without the knowledge of its subjects?

Big cannisters, eh? Now who's being sexist?

Well, it's not so much that it's insulting as it is that it's bad writing. "Swarm", "plague", horde", "mob", geez... it reads like a "pretty good" sports article in a high-school newspaper. Or a sportscast on KNTU....

Hasn't Buddy Childers passed away as well?

Think you're correct. Bingo!

Well, my take is that he came here, discovered that his article was the subject of a lengthy thread, and bumped it by posting his reaction. But it was me who got the pot boiling again by taking exception to what I considered an accusation of misogyny that had no real basis in fact. Hey, whatever. It just seems that a few people have shown up here lately whose main intent seems to be "analyzing" this community, mostly for the flaws (real or imagined). Then when they get called on it (either politely or in patented Gould-illa style ), they get all passive-agressive and shit. It does make one take pause, it does....

I was at the Village Gate for a "Salsa Meets Jazz" session one night back when when some Mariel refugees/drummers came up on break and jammed for about 15-20 minutes. bvSome heavy shit, that was! I think the main gig was Baretto/Donaldson. Sal Cuevas was on bass, and that was a real treat. I'm wanting to say that somebody who was in that group of drumming refugees went on to become somewaht of a "name" ehre in the US, but darned if ?I know who.

Papa Jo?

Ok.

Observation: if i were the subject of that kind of remark, I'd leave, too. (And be fully justified in doing so.) The funny (as in "odd") thing: I never viewed jazz - and jazz fandom - as a "guy thing" until I began reading various jazz listservs and boards. Maybe that's because of my background as a kid (my mom loves jazz, had ambitions to be a professional musician at one time) + knowing many other women who love jazz and have been actively involved in every angle from promotion to DJing/running a jazz station to publishing to just buying records and going to live gigs... So the internet was a real shock in that respect - few to no women around, lots of misogynistic remarks, etc. My feeling is that there are a lot of women out here who largely choose to ignore internet discussion boards, for whatever reasons. I've taken long breaks from them in the past myself, due to all kinds of things (misogynistic comments being one factor, but not the primary one). I was hesitant to join this board and have found it to be, for the most part, far friendlier than I'd anticipated - but some of the things that have been said in this thread really give me pause - as a newb on this board, that is. (Would be true if I were a man.) I hope this post serves as food for thought. Best, seeline You, btw, are in no ways included in the "Castro" remark, as your contributions have consistently been sensitive, intellegent, and totally "friendly" in spirit.

This thread is over a year old and had lain dormant for a good while. It was reopened exactly why? So the author of the orignally quoted article (apparently an AAJ regular) could come in, call attention to themselves, and stir up some more of the same old shit? What else am I missing here? I smell sabotage here. Call me crazy, but the previous reference to Castro was intended. If I'm wrong, apologies. If not, hey.

Irony is not a lost art!

Ain't nothin' that "simple", that's all I'm, sayin'. Except for people who really are that simple.

"I use the Ace of Clubs to keep my baby in place" - "Ace Of Spades", OV Wright We got any OV Wright fans on this board?

Hey, remember when Castro needed some breathing room & let all the criminals and loonies go free & then aimed e'ma ll at America? Wasn't that a fun time for everybody?

One thing I've come to believe is unshakably true - "jazz" is not a "style" of music. It's a state of mind that has been, so far, expressed through various sets of musical devices through which you can draw an evolutionary line. But without that "state of mind" thing, the link between, say, Lester Young & Anthony Braxton might be impossible to discern (and even with it, it's going to be hard for some to discern). Point being (for me) - I take a look at how the various "tools" (and that includes technology) are being used, not the least of which is "the message" of the music. If it's "about" excellence, resilliance, and humanity, hey, good enough. I figure that they've gotten the essence of the message. And if it's using some overtly "jazz devices" in terms of harmony, structure, rhythmic impetus (and not to beat a personal dead horse here, but it amazes me just how hard a lot of this house/broken-beat stuff swings), inflection, etc., I figure that they've gotten the root specifics of the message as well. From there...hey. It's a different world. The cultural dynamic (specifically that of the African-American vs/in-synch with The Euro/Semetic-Americans) that created most of 20th Century Jazz, has evolved in some pretty fundamental ways. So has the ways of learning/disseminating the knowledges of this music, as has the "who" parts of ""who is this gonna be germane to?" When the sociology changes this much, this fundamentally, the "exterior" (i.e. - the "style") of the music almost has to follow suit. If it doesn't, something's wrong somewhere... There's a superb essay (technically an interview, but...) by Bill Dixon that's the liner notes for his Soul Note disc In Italy Volume One. The interviewer asks Dixon about the observation that the "new jazz" seems to have lost touch with its African-American audience & connected instead w/a European one, even as the practitioners of that music continued to be primarily African-American. Dixon takes it all back to bebop, and how greater exposure to a variety of musics leads to different musical options which then leads to different goals and then different intents and how that may lead the artist away from his community, which does not necessarily have the same initial options of exposure, since for them, music, although a key part of theiir lifestyle, is not "their life" as it is for a musician. He goes on from there, all quite logically, I think, but at some point, he seems to feel a bit of betrayal or something at the audience not wanting to keep up or something. Which I mean, hey, we've all been there, and sure, "the average listener" would not in any plausible scenario be harmed by getting "smartened up" or something, but after a while I think you just gotta accept that if you play specialized music (and Dixon freely stipulates that the thrust of the new musics has been towards self first, audience second, which imo is in no way intrinsically malevolent in and of itself), you're gonna have a specialized audience, not that that's "fair" or anything, just that that's how it is, and good luck on making it otherwise. But, just as the jazz musician might have "outran" their audience, now, maybe, society has "outran" the jazz musician and actually been a part of a "new paradigm" that's got underway (and is still in its embryonic stage, to be sure) largely without any involvement from "the jazz musician" who has been busy in the practice room and other Outposts Of Artistic Excellence. This is a huge shift form the early part of the 20th century where "jazz" (note the quotation marks, I also include "African" and "Primitive" in there as well) was smack dab in the middle of damn near everybody's New Paradigm (which now seems to be the beginning if the culmination of the Industrial Age Paradigm, only now with "non-Europeans" getting to be free-willed participants rather than robotic cogs). So I don't think it at all odd that "the people" now might be finding themselves in the unlikely role of Bringing Jazz Into The 21st Century, because Music About Music will always ultimately be little more than craft, and as much as I appreciate, value, and am willing to pay good bucks for a top-grade plumber, I ain't gonna leave my house to watch him work, if you know what I mean. Which is, I guess, a long way of saying that my plan is to be there when needed, try to stay out of the way when not, try to always encourage intelligent independent thought no matter what "direction" it takes, and to always remember that "finding one's voice" is indeed a bitch (and a half), made even more difficult by the incessant chatter of Salesmen Who Want you To Have Theirs For God Only Knows What Reason.

For that matter, the Pearl Jam set coming on the heels of Cobain's death was pretty intense.

Wow, somebody's finally doing Alan's music, excellent! Too bad they got the name wrong.

I wonder what we mean by "young people"? Most of this discussion has centered on minors, but that's just one segment of "young people". What about the age group of, say, 18-28? That's still "young" by any definition. And there, I think, you find plenty of opportunity to be exposed to jazz, if not directly, then certainly indirectly. There's enough jazz that has infiltrated various house and hip-hop scenes that if you have ears to hear, you will certainly get your chance, and if you don't, hey, what else is new? I think it's funny that a lot of people seem to think that "getting into jazz" equates with becoming an obsessive record collector/historian/Guardian Of Yesterday's Blues (thanks, Leroi/Amiri!). Gimme a break, please. If you get somebody to hear a, say, Budd Johnson cut and respond to it positively, beautiful. If they go so far as to buy an album or two, hey, exquisite. But to expect them to welcome a piling on of biographical and discographical info and CDs of alternate takes and everything he ever played on, c'mon man, ain't but a very special kind of freak (and we is them) got either the time and/or inclination to go there. If the number of "broken-beat", "club jazz", "jazzy house", etc, recordings being released internationally are any indication, there are still young people who are "into jazz" in the sense of pursuing what they perceive to be the music's "state of mind" even if the replication of specifics is not always on their agenda. This upsets many "jazz fans", who fail to see the connection between waht they know as "jazz" and what they hear these "young people" doing with samples, drum programs, dance grooves, etc. Oh well about that, I say. Somebody earlier quoted an older teacher as saying something along the lines of always look towards the present but never forget the past. Well, that sounds all nice and wise and shit, but it's fundamentally evil for one basic reason - it totally ignores the imperative to realize a present. The past is over, the future is at best hypothetical, all we really got is the present. And if we spend our present looking back and/or ahead, what do we "create"? Either a pale imitation or a theoretical postulation. The true innovators of this music did not create a "future", the realized a present that was so compelling that it forced other to wake up to it (and in the process of catching up to it, realize that they had in fact been "asleep" to their own current reality). And that is the real gift of any "artist" - to present the present to us as a present. The riches of this music's past are indescribably deep, but they are also just as surely of the past. This should not be a problem, but it inevitably becomes one, and not just because of the usual shrugging off as "irrelevant" of all things "past" by "youth". It also becomes a problem when "we" insist that "the music is just as relevant now as it was then" and we do it in a literal sense, as if playing like Miles (any era, including electric) is going to "pack the same punch" and therefore carry the same power in 2008 as it did in 1948, 1958, 1968, or 1988. Or even that how Miles played was what made him matter. Nonsense, all of it. Like "technique", "style" is just a tool, a specific means to a greater ends, which is communication of a message. And is interesting, intriguing, and yes, important as the study of all those tools are, the first thing to be recognized if Miles is to be taken seriously by future generations is the essence of that message. And as hard a time as we might have in "defining" it, the fact seems to me to remain - any artist that continues in "relevancy" to future generation does so not because of specifics of execution, but because of relevancy of message. Armstrong, Ellington, Bird, Trane, you name 'em, they all "speak" through music in a way that transcends mere "music". Now, how they did this, might well be tied into what was mentioned before - they discovered the eternal in their specific temporal. In other words, their music was totally of their present, but it also defined that present in terms that would forever be relevant, even above/beyond/past the three-dimensional Paradigm Of Perception that we rapidly see/sense collapsing all around us. Because "eternal" really does mean eternal! But it's not, I repeat, is not, the "style" of the musics that makes them eternally relevant, it is their spirits. And getting 15 year olds to think along those lines about artists who were possible dead before their parents were born is asking quite a lot of even extraordinary 15 year olds even in extraordinary times. And asking 25 year olds to appreciate the techniques involved in say, "Giant Steps" is like handing them a rotary phone or an automotive carburetor or a PC w/a 486K/2X processor and asking them to not just appreciate it for the triumph each represents, but to be in awe of it for the rest of their life. Each was indeed a magnificent accomplishment, but life has changed to the point where new challenges,and therefore the need for new triumphs, have since arisen, continue to arise, and forever will it be so. Life does indeed go on. But if it's nostalgic at best (and just plain stupid at worst) to expect anybody to live in a museum, it's anything but that to present them with past examples of past triumphs of mind, body, and spirit over past presents in the hopes of providing inspirations for the same in our current (and future) presents. But that requires a lot of "letting go" that I sense that a lot of "us" don't have, for reasons about which I'll not even begin to speculate, if only because I suspect that they range...all over the place. But it all comes down to this for me - the best thing that we "older" folk can do for "young people" today, a time in which technology really is "changing everything" in a way none of us have ever seen, is not to give them our house to move into. It's to see to it that they are motivated to build for themselves the houses that best allow them to thrive in an environment of love, trust, and joy. To the extent that we can do this for them, we should. Other than that, we should stay the hell outta their way and let them get there themselves. Sure, they'll fuck it up. So did we. But the only thing worse than making your own mistakes is not making any mistakes at all, which is what the Unconditional Acceptance Of The Music Of The Past At Face Value is a One Way Ticket to.