JSngry

http://www.houseafrika.com/

http://www.samc.co.za/

I take it that you know Mr. Vega?

Ok folks, welcome to Geekland! http://forum.saxontheweb.net/showthread.php?t=458 Specifically: http://forum.saxontheweb.net/showpost.php?...amp;postcount=5

I've seen a couple of Selmer horns that were modified for Varitonic activities. In addition the pickup on the neck of the horn, there was also a long tube or conduit that was attached to the body (tucked in amidst the rest of the keywork and lacquered to look like just one more rod). Apparently the wires would go from the neck pickup, down through that tube, then out from the lower end of the horn to the Varitone unit/amp. What I don't know is whether this modification was done at the Selmer factory, or if the Varitone folks bought up a bunch of horns and did the work on them. Over the last year or so, I've done some experimenting with some effects on my tenor. I got a Digitech vocal processor, and have used it on some funk gigs to do some octaves, some fourthy doublings, and some envelope filter/wah effects. A little goes a long way... Whoa, did not know that! Apparently I am not correct that there was never such a thing as a Varitone Sax per se. http://www.saxophone.org/varitone.html However, the notion of it being a separate unit added to a pre-existing horn is not incorrect either: http://forum.saxontheweb.net/showthread.php?t=39785 What's still not clear to me is if the actual "Varitone Sax" was simply a "Mark VI Plus" or a unique horn design unto itself.

And another thing - I have next to never observed a black musician vibing a white one on the grounds of "entitlement". I have seen a lot of vibing about a misunderstanding/lack of understanding about things like nuance and "flavor", and if that gets too heated it will turn "racial" (and why shouldn't it, because almost always this understanding gap has its roots in the side-effects of American racial life), but if you can play and don't give off a wierd vibe like massive insecurity or massive assumed parity or anything like that, things usually get played out ok. I do, however, see/hear a lot of white players getting all bent out of shape about black players feeling a "sense of attachment" to the music on personal, cultural grounds, to which I say GET YOUR HEAD OUTCHER ASS. I guarantee you - if Eskimo Folk Music became something that the world went crazy over and there were dollars to be made and cultural institutions to be built and White People really got into playing the stuff because they really liked it and felt it at at least some level, there would be a "Eskimo Folk Music, once the province of a handful of people, has now become A Universal Language that the whole world participates in" thing going on, and that there would be some white people who got confused, insulted, hurt, whatever if/when they went to hang/jam with some Eskimo Folk musicians and felt a funny vibe, just as there would be some 5th generation Eskimo Surfboarder in SoCal who decided to reclaim his roots simply by saying that he was reclaiming his roots. All this shit is really simple, but the acting out of it very seldom is.

No idea what "the bug" is/was. Got any more details? Now, I seem to remember horn pickups that were used for straight amplification in lieu of miking, no pitch/tone alteration possibilities, but they never really caught on because, geez, that is what mikes are for after all...

In Dallas anyway, more than a few black jazz musicians are alive, well, and more often than not neither seeking involvement in nor participating in the "general" scene of white owned/patronized clubbage, "series", etc. Yet music continues to get made, peformances given, and players nurtured. The music tends to not be particularly "innovative", but the spirit is usually livlier and friskier. It's not anything "exclusive", but if you don't know about it/want to find it, you won't, and that doesn't seem to bother those involved one iota. Guess they haven't yet gotten the word that it not "their" music any more...

Oh, btw, there is/was no such thing as a "Varitone sax". The Varitone was a device that worked off an input from the instrument, almost always through a pickup (usually on the neck; I've got an old King tenor whose neck has been patched/repaired as a result of having once been altered to accomodate a pickup attachment), although a few rare people ran it off a mike input. It wasn't a separate instrument.

I played a tenor ran through a multivider in high school, once or twice. The band director also owned a music store and would bring one in for a day or two every so often. Difficult to control (at least for a high schooler), but not impossible, and the sense of "possibility" made itself readily apparent. Tried a lyricon out a few times during the 70s in various music stores. Weird, not immediately to my liking, but not repugnant either. Lacking as I did at the time savings, generous income, good credit, and/or endorsement deals, that was as far as it went. EWI? Maybe once, but if so, at the height of my Jazz Snob Purist Caveman days. I probably refused to remember that I even thought about it...

Right. First used sfter Clark Terry? Before Miles? Before Miles, defintely. And a lot more "elaborately". Whe was the Terry thing done? Released in '67, but recorded when? Ellis was into a whole range of electronics besides the Varitone, btw. Ring modulators, multividers, god knows what else. If it was out there, he would try it. Looking at some of these things, you gotta consider the "industry background" of something like the Varitone. Terry & Trane were no doubt approached by Selmer, not the other way around. In the Selmer boardroom/wherever Trane was "the leading innovator in jazz today" & Terry was no doubt "one of America's most widely heard trumpeters" or soemthing like that. Believe me - neither one of them paid a cent to get hooked up with their Varitones. As for the others, I can't say, but I do know that endorsement deals are one of the best-kep secrets between musicians and the "general public", so nothing would surprise me, like if Selmer gave Konitz one w/o him even asking for it and he fiddled around with it and thought "hmmmmm....ok, interesting. Let's try it for a while..." as opposed to him waking up from a dream in a cold sweat and reaching for the phone saying "Goddamit, I got to check out this electric shit. Manny, send me a rig. NOW!!!"

Sorry to insert that little rant in there, but that's the way I see it. I can't argue with your intentions and ideals, Jim, and won't, but it's like the joke about the Irishman asked for directions to some place: "I wouldn't start from here." And yes, I know there's no alternative - that's the joke. MG Ok, I was just back from a road gig when I read/posted last night, and I see that I misinterpreted your comment as a dig against the musicians, producers, & "deep fans" of the music. I still disagree with that, all you gotta do is check out the umpteeen jillion (my new favorite lucky number, btw) blogs, internet radio shows/podcasts, etc to realize pretty quickly that there's some informed minds playing in this sandbox. Maybe not "experts", but people with deep curiosity, open souls and minds, and a willingness to soak it all in. That's the level to which I'm referring, because as with most musics, that's the level where the music gets made and its, for lack of a more precise term at this moment, "soul" gets defined. I now see that you're talking more about the level of "average fan", and for all I know, you may well be right. Since this music seems to be created for "consumption" by an audience who will be hearing it in clubs for a wide variety of "social" reasons, your comments may well be spot-on. But that's not the level at which I've been exploring this music, and besides, I think that's what you run up against with consumers of music of almost any variety once you get too far outside the ring of musicians, producers, & "deep fans". But I can see how this music, which is almost always heard live in recorded/mixed form, might be even more prone to that. Still, I see your point, and will not disagree. But - I still think that a music that is "jazz based" in mind (and partial spirit) and "dance underground"-centric in body (and partial spirit) could be used to touch the whole spirits of a lot of people that are currently being less than fully-served by either music as it is being made today.

Gee, I though I was just developing a complex or something...

Don Ellis.

Sorry, MG, I'm not at all hearing/feeling that at all, at least not in the stuff I've been getting into. Either we're hearing different things or hearing things differently.

Well if it makes anybody feel any better, Campisi's in Dallas serves up some of the worst swill masquerading as "Italian food" in the tri-continent area, yet the business continues to boom, maybe because in the public eye, the Mafia connections of the father/founder = that if it was good enough for a Mafia boss, it must be pretty damn good. But the people that know Italian food know that it's pure shit. So hey.

Rat Own!

Well screw them. For real. But to keep it real, you gotta say screw them if they say they like it too.

with equal right to 'play the blues' - yeah, pretty much everybody has the "right" to play the blues these days. So what does that say about what "the blues" have become? it's a language that's handed down and it speaks to fundamental human emotions. Yes it is. So is damn near almost every musical language. If you're saying neither kid has the right to play the blues, I might agree. Well nopw, we don't want to deny anybody their rights now, do we? I wouldn't question their rights, but I do have to wonder what their need is, to speak in such a specific musical language. For the black kid, it might be a case of wanting to be like grandpa, because grandpa was such a bad motherfucker. For the white kid, it might be a case of wnating to be like the black kid's grandpa because the black kid's grandpa was such a bad motherfucker. Or maybe the white kid's grandpa was a bad motherfucker. Could be. Either way, neither of them is likely to be particularly "authentic" in a way that has any gripping importance, so anybody who chooses one over the other on grounds that are most likely is only participationg in the illusion that all parties have signed on for. Since that's a game I'm not interested in playing, I'm not about to respect the ground rules, and they can both go ahead and "play the blues" afaic, and I'm probably going to ignore both of them for more or less the same reason. Someone should play the blues imho. I guess, but at this point, why belabor them? Somebody should always play Bach too, but that doesn't mean I want to hear it being done in every corner bar... there ain't gonna be old blacks guys around much longer with real roots to do it. Wellsir, the old black guys were once young black guys, and their roots in the music were in the real time world that created the need for the music. We got their records, and at this point, with very few exceptions, "authenticity" that's either conferred or denied on any grounds is just so much ado about not a lot of anything that particularly matters relative to the source. Now don't get me wrong. I love playing blues, and I love listening to blues. But I'm under no illusion that hardly any of it is "real" in the sense that it used to be. The closest I got to that was playing with Little Joe Blue. That band was mixed, and the black guys were coming from a strong R&B background, and they sure as hell weren't "authentic blues" the same way the Joe himself was. None of us were. And that's grounds for consideration...

Before I decided on Music Education as my college major, I was also toying with both psychology and advertising as areas of study. Now, if I had any sense of opportunism whatsoever, I would combine all three anf become a preacher... Seriously, yeah, I know it's not that simple. But as a motivator to get shit going where I (we?) think it would be better for it to go, you need ideals, and that strikes me as good a one as any. What you don't need are ideals tha build flase hopes of total fulfillment. Shit's always going to be the proverbial "work in progress", and hey, that's fine with me. What's not fine is when it's all work and no progress, or even worse, all work and all regress. And failure to get it together, let it go, and then move on inevitably leads there. At least that's how I see it. A white guy "playing the blues" down to every last "authentic" detail doesn't work for me, and the more techically facile it is, the less it works (probably because of all the conspicuous "work" involved...). A white guy playing music in a blues context that speaks to his unique "whiteness" (to whatever degree it exists) learning from and speaking in/to the unique language of the blues in such a way that it becomes another, valid "dialect", hey, that's good for me, good for music, and good for life. But how often does that happen? Tell you what (again) - the "dance underground" is waaaay ahead of the rest of the music world as far as this whole thing goes. Whatever/however one feels about the music itself, that shit is the truest example of a freakin' pan-global (sic) "melting pot" that I know of. That more than anything else is what gets me excited about it - the possibilities inherent in the attitude that says be who you are, bring what you got, we don't give a damn if you're black, white, Asian, German, straight, gay, spiritual, hedonist, right-handed, cleft-palleted, whatever, it don't matter. Bring what you got and let's party with it, it - and you - are all good like that. There's got to be a way to bring that deep, fundamental spirit of acceptance/inclusiveness into the "mainstream" and build it into a general lifestyle. If that means turning away from conscious "Art Music" for a little while or longer, so be it. "Art" will inevitably happen in spite of itself. But so will cultural inertia. Yeah, it's a utopian notion, no doubt. But again, it's something worth moving towards, I think, and since this life on this plane is not infinite in duration, ehy, why not?

Well, yeah, sure. But when was this decided, who decided it, and after all, wasn't the American West a land created for human expression? And what about blues? Not ever/still an ethnic folk music? Westward ho! Let me put it this way - Warne Marsh was one of the greatest, deepest, jazz musicians that there's been. He defintiely used the idiom as a means to a deeper end. And there have been plenty of other white players thorughout the music that have done the same, although probably not to that degree (I mean, Warne was about as deep as anybody can get). So the issue is not "can white guys play?" Of course they can. But I unambiguously believe that in order to get to the crux of the matter, questions of identity must be confronted with nothing less than full honesty before one "moves on" and thinks/feels/whatever that everything is ok. The notion that you can play all these funkysoulful cultuirallyspecific in origin licks and hey, it's ok because this is now a UNIVERSAL MUSIC and where it came from just doesn't matter any more can only mean one of two things - 1) that that attitude is wrong, and that those who don't take the time to delve into the non-musical essence of the language are some jive motherfuckers who deserve all the scorn they get, even that which comes from people who are jive motherfuckers themself; or 2) that the music really has become a generic "style" that anybody really can play if they just spend the time developing the appropriate muscle memory skills. To use Warne as a continuing example, I'd be very surprised if he didn't understand very well what the "black jazz" language was all about, and that he knew that it was not something to play with just because you "liked" it (c.f. Chuck's suit analogy). Similarly, I'd like to think that J.R. Montrose had a grasp of that too. Two totally different outcomes there, Warne was very "white", J.R. "black", but in both cases you got guys getting far beyond the surface of the music instead of just skating on it. Did/do some black players skate along on the surface? Sure, especially today when the learning playing field has been greatly levelled (and in more ways than one...). But back in the day it was significantly less tolerated in the community than it is today, and that goes, I think, to the issue of ongoing relevancy. If jazz is now something that damn near anybody can learn and "play well" without concern for anything more than a generic "jazz identity", then hell, it might as well be instrumental karaoke for highly motivated quirky people. And that, I think, is largely what it's become. If it's "better" or "worse" because of that is an individual opinion, but anybody who claims that it's "the same" cannot be taken seriously. It's a helluva lot easier to say that "race doesn't matter", and then mantracize that as an excuse to not deal with it, than it is to deal with it head on and ongoingly, figure a bunch of shit out, and then say that race (or more truthfully/accurately, the hookup between cultural identity and musical voice - there is no one "true black sound", just as there is no one "true white sound") doesn't matter. The people who take the first route are a scourge on humanity, but the people who take the second route are one of humanity's best hopes. The answers are ultimately very simple - be who you are and act out of love no matter whowhatwherewhenwhyetc. and don't look back (c.f. both Satchell Paige & Lot's wife). And thank god, there are pockets of players of all musics who are getting there (and probably not coincidentally are far less hung up on militant musical/idiomatic segregation than those who aren't...). Getting to those answers and to that place (in America anyway) has been anything but easy, to this point anyway. Anybody who tells you otherwise is either a fool or a liar.

It was So Doggone Good, that one was. I mean really, with Stitt, it's very seldom a question of what he's going to play. How he's gonna play it, that's where the suspense come in.

Ok, it's the Artist Share album Out Of The Circle that I'm thinking about that Monday's more involved in. My bad.

Warning - Ramble Overdrive Alert in FULL effect. No, I think I'm talking about the visual/racial element. If that ties into the "is jazz relevant today" thing, and I thnk it does, so be it. Here's my thing - we can all accept "Latin Music", "Celtic Music". "Greek Music", etc. as being ethno-specific in origin, and probably don't have too hard a time with the notion that the performances that speak most diredctly to the soul of the music are those by people who spring from the respective culture. But when ti comes to African-American music, all of a sudden there's this culture of The Great White Hope(s) and white folk all out the ass talking about "color doesn't matter" and shit. Well ok, that's right. Color doesn't matter. But culture, that combination of shared experiences, collective attitude, smotional/spiritual dialect, all that stuff, hell yeah, that matters, and the way America works is that it's a lot easier to assimilate the culture of your race than it is somebody else's. Things are opening up as bi/multi-racial realtionships, offspring, and extended families more and more become the norm, but this is still very early in the cultural evolution game relative to what's already on the record. Noq, there's lots of white folks who "study" black culture, there's lots who associate quite a bit inside it, and that's all good, but at the end of the day, if a cop pulls you over, he don't know none of that shit. He just knows "black" or "white", and any white folk that don't feel it that that is a core, fundamental difference right there that extends on out into the greater culture on a 24-7 basis can study and associate all they want to, they ain't gonna get the finer points, and therefore can only bring it so far. Now as far as black culture goes, the end of segregation changed some things pretty fundamentally. If the core of some parts of the black experience (and not just the unpleasant ones like the cop thing mentioned above) remain largely in place, other parts have become more diffuse as assimilation has occured to varying degrees. No value judements offered on that here, and none really needed, since it's just more human evolution in action. It is what it is, and it's gonna be what it's gonna be. So yeah, you got some white folks who "inderstand" black music more than some black folks. But if you do really understand it, you gotta understand that a white guy, even one who really does understand it, playing it makes it something else altogether than what it once was. It's either going to expand the ongoing relevancy of the root, or else it's going to distort it, maybe even obliterate it. Maybe even both at different junctures. And as long as America is what it is, total assimilation by anybody into anybody else's world outside of the metaphorical behind closed doors is...impossible? This is where the visual/race thing plays into the "is jazz relevant" thing. As I said earlier, the culture that produced "jazz as we know it" is pretty much gone, perhaps (or not) coinciding with the opening up of race relations in America. So now it's "everybody's music", yet it still, in no way, is it "everybody's culture". I can see the need for white folk to embrace it so readily as a sign that hey, things are better now, I embrace you as a brother, and I can see the need for black folk to say whoa, wait a minute, you got no right to take it that far that quick, we still got some understandings to come to, so back off. And the younger the generation is, the more that at once the need for reconcilliation comes up against the need to defend the honor of the ancestors (and this goes for white as well as black) in ways that lead to all kinds of wacky shit, like nobody really knowing who's dealing and who isn't because nobody really knows anymore what dealing really is. Or so it seems more and more. So if all anybody knows anymore is the facts without the truth that comes along with them, how is that relevant to anything other than getting more and more away from the source, and who wants to be a part of that type of "relevancy"? I know I'm speaking very broadly here, but geez, tell me with a straight face that there's no truth in it whatsoever. Put aside all the idiots (and they are many in number and international in place) who want "authenticity" served up to them like a Happy Meal, all prepackaged according to factory spec and propaganda-induced expectations, with a little toy included just to make let you KNOW that you've gotten the real thing, the question still remains - is it really worth it to anybody to devote as much, if not more, energy to "preserving" a culture that no longer really exists when there's such a broad disunderstanding (sic) of what that culture means/meant by the various parties involved in the attempted preservation? Doesn't that just refeed the old problems and allow them to rebirth? Tell you what - if nobody played, sang, heard, or saw any jazz, blues, whatever for the next 150 years and all of a sudden it was all made available again, who would hear what how? If we could take all the souls of today and imagine what these musics would sound like to them if they didn't know what they were "supposed" to "mean", what would we get? The mind reels at how shit might get played out under those circumstances, if for no other reason than if the music really "transcends" its cultural specificity, then everybody would likely hear it about the same. And I don't think that's gonna happen. Hell, it don't happen now. I bet you a dollar that a lot of both white and black people who today proclaim their love of jazz and blues would recoil in near-psychotic revulsion and/or fear if they heard jazz and blues not knowing what it was supposed to be. And that a lot fo people who today who have little or no use for it would be fascinated by it. So in that fantastic sense, the music itself might be positied to have lost its relevance because its not about the music anymore, it's about what the music's supposed to be (or have been) and nobody's really hearing the music any more nearly as much as they are the "significance", which is something that was really only specifically relevant to a world that no longer exists. So, the music is not relevant to the perception, and the perception is not relevant to the music. Why not just fucking forget about all that, let it mean to you whatever it means to you, and get on with today's business, realizing that the past is over, that it will never mean the same thing to everybody, but that between what it means to you and what it means to somebody else, there's a present that can be used to build a tomorrow where it's always going to be today. Now that's something worth devoting some time and energy to!