JSngry

If you're going to comapre everybody to MAx Roach, damn near almost everybody's gonna fall short. And there it is. This is not something I take lightly, having suffered (and still prone to suffering) massive bouts of inferiority complexes for exactly this same reason. I'm a tenor player. So was Coleman Hawkins, so was LEster Young, so was Sonny Rollins, so was John Coltrane. Ooops, don't need me then, do you now... Even making room under the highest bar, so was Joe Henderson, so was Harold Land, so was Chu Berry, so were ahelluva lot of people. Ooops, still don't need me then, do you now... I'm really into balance these days, seems like the right/best/whatever way to keep shit from getting dysfunctional and/or destructive and still be real. So, although I applaud edc's militancy in the face of machine-generated manipulative fal$e iconographie$ and fully recognize giving tit for tat, outside of the that particular arena, there's a different reality at play, and in that one, Herbie Hancock, faults real and imagined alike, has plenty to be proud about (and although I don't know how the hell it's happened, I've seen Speak Like A Child go in estimation from "masterpiece" to "snoozer" in the last 35 or so years...) & just as much to not be proud about. Yes, I can acknowledge the hype & the wasted/overinflated/whatevers and the real accomplishments equally. I also maintain that the guy's real strengths & instincts lie in the areas of color & texture, and that the further from those focal points his various works venture, the more prone to disappointment I am. And vice-versa. Is he a Freakin' Genius? Hell no. But he ain't a Worthless Specimen Of Masturatory Offal either, unless you wanna play the game where there's only one level that really counts. And even if there really is (and I still can't disabuse myself of the notion that there is...), that shit'll make you suicidal - y'all don't hear me now, literally suicidal - if you can't make peace with the concept of "relative worthiness". And suicidal just ain't cool with me these days.

At the risk of appearing glib, I'd just like to convey to Taru that your dad's music has long been a source of deep inspiration & pleasure. My life has been immeasurably blessed by encountering his music, and I wish you well in your attemmpts to present it in an ongoing & dignified manner. "What Would It Be Without You?" indeed!

The thing about a lot of albums is that after you say "This is good, especially cuts S, F, & J", "Bill Shakes playes exceptionally well here", and a few people pitch in with "I also like Album C by so-and-do", theat're pretty much all there really is to say. That's not a problem, imo, but it does explain why lengthy, in-depth conversations of many, many albums don't unfold. Good is good, and that is that.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=DEwp5QFcFP4

What kind of details do you need about a heroin overdose?

Specific examples, off the top of my head, no, but what I mean, and you can probably come up with some on your own, is that sometimes Herbie stretches the harmony out for primarily functional reasons, and sometimes he does it for primarily coloristic reasons. You can usually tell which is which, because when it's functional, he'll patternize it and shit, but when it's for color/texture, all bets are off as to where it's gonna go. The drag for me is that as the years go by, it's become more and more of the former, and perhaps not coincidentally, it seems to me to have begun when he made the hard switch back to playing accoustic piano. Not that it was the fault of the instrument or anything, just that that might have been a sign of a willingness to play off his "image" as a Badass Jazz Painist, which he certainly has been. But... I don't know if the guy's run out of ideas, or if he's got ideas but doesn't think that they're marketable enough to support him and his in the manner to which he's become accustomed, or if he's just at one of those "comfort" levels where he has nothing left to prove to himself, or what, but Village Life is the kind of thing that has long left me thinking that this might be one of those guys who might have a whole 'nother level that he doesn't show for whatever reason. But then again, if you don't use it, do you lose it?

Yep.

That one is rare as fuck. And please don't think that I have an original or otherwise "real" copy", because I don't. But it is a baaaaad motherfucker of a side, ain't it...

Same.

Charlotte Moorman died of breast cancer, I believe. Sad.

No, no no, no, no. Which is not to "defend" VSOP, just that Ron Carter playing Bach is a realm of wrongness deeeeeep unto itself. Myself, I think that Herbie should've never unplugged. For better (some) or worse (some more), that was his final destination, and he backed off when it became convinient, and by then he had lost the impetus and went instead for the pianetus. But he's always been first and foremost a texturalist (whatever that means, but I will say that when he uses harmony as harmony, ti's not nearly as effective as when he uses it as texture), and he got all of that out of straight piano + horns that he was gonna get a looooong time ago. Probably the same thing w/the pluggedinshit too, but that's a failure more of individual steam rather than outgrowing a form(at).

And the Astrodome. Dammit, we are keeping the Astrodome.

I got a cassette where the spine says Archie Sheep. Square business.

Jim -- More and and more your 21st Century sounds like a slightly modified version of the '60s, minus the psychedelic drugs. Well, the 60s were part of the 20th century, and the 20th century...

As am I, strange though it may seem.

Hey, you know, most of them motels these days got free internet somehows, so check in on your way out west. Although, why I'm leaving you a message that you'll not get until it's too late to mean anything is beyond me...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=oNtddMTxmLw Viewer "sfrnvc " says:

That statement is very telling, and maybe not how you maybe think...

Apologies to Dave Chapelle for that one, btw. No problem. As Freud (among others) said, All humor is based on hostility. Freud, Europe, "Classical" music, hey, the biggest benefit of the 20th Century, bar none, was being able to begin to get wired into non-European paradigms in a viable manner, what with the world getting "smaller" and all. Of course, that creates a whole 'nother set of "issues", big issues, but having centuries worth of "pat answers" at one's disposal for all things "cultural" ain't one of 'em. A mixed bag, that one is, and the more things change, etc., but still... Try this one - "hostility" is hard-wired into all of us. We'd not survive without it. "DAMN, that rain shit SUCKS! Fuck THIS! Why don't we move inside?" So "identifying" it is akin to discovering air, it's always there somewhere, and we kid ourselves - and quite possibly run the risk of creating more overt forms of it - if we think it's not.

Is this where I claim being intimidated by a hostile moderator?