JSngry

By far and away, imo, the most "cerebeal", inward-focused music Miles ever made. The cover says it all, as does the back cover photo. I still enjoy listening to it very much, but let's face it, sometimes it's just plain weird. Interesting, though, that part of "Country Son" would later reappear in "Ssshhh/Peaceful" on In A Silent Way".

Wow, we got rhetoric and a potential wink? She didn't look away when I called her by her name. Call the preacher, we're getting married!

No CD that I know of, but the LP's been reissued in its original form. Dusty Groove carried it recently, but at the moment doesn't seem to. Japan seems to have it, though: http://www.ticro.com/search/D10001991/no_sub/detail/

OK, but why should I let the bad behavior of the (too) many make me not look for or feel strains of genuine familial life? If I can tell the difference between the real thing and the fake, isn't shunning all familial coherence because some of what's on the market under that name is fake, even nasty fake, like letting the bastards win far more comprehensively than they ever dreamed of? Fair enough, but I guess it all depends on if you want to let a once proud & vital family evolve into a tiny little sect in the dark or if you want to keep that pride & vitality and bring it into the light as an ongoing & growing entity of relevance to more than it's ever-dwindling own. "Shunning" anything real and good and alive with the spirit of life is not something I'd ever advocate. Neither, however, is keeping it so close to the vest as to render it invisible to all but our own. If that means circulating in circles outside the immediate family, hey, send me. If that means closing the doors from the inside, count me out. That gig's more than covered as it is. Light under a bushel, and all that.

Indeed. And I'm in no way making that corellation. But too much, way too much, of the family's been getting more than a little incestuous & necrophilliac, especially inter-generational, and that has but one inevitable outcome in results mental, spiritual, and musical. And strength and integrity it ain't.

People Who Eat Manwich Sloppy Joe Sloopy

Pi is on a roll. Check'em out.

All I mean is that I'm not interested in 21st Century Jazz nearly as much as I am about 21st Century Music. There will definitely be music called "jazz" in the 21st century. Whether or not it it continues to represent the creative, insistent-on-freedom spirit of the jazz I've come to know and love or something else (like I've been sensing it doing in alarmingly increasing measure for a few decades now) entirly is out of my control. If the "bad guys" win, then "jazz" will have become something in which I really don't have an interest. I'd hate for that to happen, which is kinda why I've been here howling at the moon and the washing machine. But if that spirit gets ran out of "jazz", my concern is that it continues to live somewhere, and of that there is no guarantee. "Dark Ages" can and do happen. If ideologies and perspectives get so hardened acros the board that music becomes a group of different and rigidly defined "styles" from which one dare not deviate for fear of being banished from the landscape by the forces of fear and/or ignorance and/or meglomania, then it will happen in music. Personally, I think it already is beginng to happen.

Actually, the first Jazzland was called Southern Horizons and was straight-anead stuff. Compiled from two UK EPs, I'm told.

Peckerwood Cracker Ofay

Don't have any problems w/any of the albums myself. Yeah. it's different that w/Ornette, but everybody's playing, and playing well. Vive le differential!

I think my New Year's Resolution just became to stay the fuck away from wherever you are!

Jazzland released two Joe Harriot sides , including Free Form, both of which I found in the old Treasure City cutout bin back in my high school days. Gotta love'em both for releasing the albums, and for not preventing them from ending up in a cheapo Longview, Tx department store, even if the latter was one of those things they had no control over except by karma.

Yeah, but the shit I do that with ain't on the radio.

Pi.

Some of us are still like that!

But then I'd have to do laundry.

If push is going to come to shove, I consider the topic irrelevant.

I consider that question totally irrelevant, and it thrills me more than you know to be able to say that. It's not anything other than music, and I don't mean that as the flip endorsement of a "fan". You can dissect it to pieces and find more parts than there are in a JC Whitney catalog, but ultimately, that's all they are - parts. It really is an "omnimusic" in that although it's made up of seemingly damn near everything at one point or another (and there are so many points, since there is no one "type" of song she makes), no one thing is more "core" to it than anything else. I've been more liberated by hearing something that does it like this than anything since....I don't know. Think about it - what could be more natural to so many of us than to make a music that organically contains all the elements of who we are? But how many of us are still struggling with the concepts of "style" and "genre"? How many of us are still thinking in terms of musical "guilty pleasures"? These are all tools of self-imposed limitations, musical and personal, and they're encouraged both from within "the business" and from without it. And more often than is comfortable to admit, such a mindset provides safe haven for people who are looking to be all they can't (and/or don't want to) be. Life is so vast & infinite, and individuals are so miniscule & finite. Yet opposites attract. So why the seemingly innate (although I believe it to be conditioned) urge to limit the scope/range of this natural attraction? That's just not working for me any more. It did when what I had access to was limited (and even then, it was pretty damn diverse), but now that the "Global Village" (and where's McLuhan now that we need him? But that's ok, Braxton's still here) is more than just an idea, it really seems time to let it go. Let it go, that's the thing. Just let it go. And then see where it leads.

That number might be on the high side... Or not. But I agree with Ms. Graham.

Since Monday has come up in this thread, let me say that the biggest musical revelation I've gotten from discovering her (and it's the biggest musical revelation I've had in years, although in retrospect it seems so simple as to be painfully, DUH-ishly obvious) is that most of us have lived a life surrounded by all kinds of people and all kinds of music, and that in order to best make music that reflects who we are, there's absolutely no reason to shut anything out. But most of us have been precondiitioned to segregate first, and then "fuse" when needed. Monday's music seems to me to take the opposite tact - you include everything from the git-go, and then filter out what doesn't meet your needs for any given situation, which as her music amply shows, is actually very little. Even though it runs counter to the way that most of us have been thinking (and maybe feeling), that just makes more sense to me. I don't see any sense in limiting what "should" be a part of our music, or of having the equivalent of bench players, little things to call on when we want a special "effect". Jazz in particular (or maybe it just seems that way to me, and all musics are like this) has developed a really bad case of telling itself that this is what it must be, the result being that too many people are changing who they are (or could be) to make themselves fit "the music" instead of letting the music be who they are. Of course, you could/should ask the question, what type of person allows themselves to surrender their core humanity for the sake of "belonging"? Or, if they're really not surrendering anything, but are instead finding their identity by stepping into a ready-made, relatively firm set of pre-existing criteria and conditions, how is that any different from joining a cult? Jazz originally sprang up, developed, and evolved for a good long while, within a fairly specific set of "macro" social conditions & environments (which is not to say that the music was necessarily "about" those things, only that those things did have an intrinsic role in how & what the music became). The forces that created those conditions still exist, definitely, but the environments for the most part don't. We have more than basic documentation of what that all was, so why is there a need to so specifically replicate what alredy exists on such a seemingly broad scale? It's all in the mind, I tell you. Too many minds seem to be working on the assumption that since there is profund universal truth to be found in yesterday's specific conditions, that taking the specific manifestations of that truth and applying them to today's different conditions (and conditions today are far more different in some pretty basic ways than ever) will yield the same profound specific truth. I disagree.

Who was it who said that a great artist isn't ahead of their time, that most people are behind their's?

More than wonderful!

Vaughn Meader Lovely Rita, Meter Maid Janice Van Meeter

Well, it is, and it isn't. Sanborn was a master at "fitting the message to the medium" on those cameos he did on all the hits of the 70s. Eight bars or so, say what you got to say within the context, and then get out. If you listen to what he does in those few bars, it's actually quite musical, usually. Not at all unlike the soloists in the big bands in the 78 era, if you can entertain that notion.