JSngry

LATE? It's only 5 in the afternoon!

I'm deeply inspired by my late father damn near every day. But I don't wear his clothes. That doesn't seem to be a contradiction. EXACTLY!!!

Well, of course. But those are places you never will go, because those are places that don't exist anymore. If the inspiration is to find those places that don't exist anymore, then...no thank. But if the inspiration is to find some places here, now that you haven't been before, then hell yeah! That's all I'm saying - the past should inspire the present to create the future. It shouldn't inspire the present to rebuild the past.

Nor do I. But I don't wear in 2006 what I wore in 1976 either. Even if I could still fit into it, I wouldn't.

As a time of action, yeah, the present is definitely the most important point in time. But if you try to prepare for the present while it happens, you're gonna be S.O.L. "In the moment" is a vital notion, but I'm afraid it's been somewhat over-romanticized. You don't practice/rehearse/compose/etc. for the moment, you do it to be ready in the future - when "the moment" actually arrives. You want to have the tools to be able to handle it, and if you don't, your past will fuck up your present, and your future won't be all that you want it to be. Inspiration is indeed a matter of the moment, but being able to handle it isn't, except in those very rare occasions where we do something "over our heads". And I don't think that anybody would recommend depending on that happening as a matter of course... Ok, as somebody who's participated in a few recordings, all of which I believed in at the time, and most of which I still do believe in, I can tell you that there's a certain amount of vanity involved. You think that you've got something to say, and you want it heard. So you make the record. It's a way of saying, "Hey world, I'm here". And yes, there is commerce involved, defintiely. You're hoping that enough people will hear the music and like it enough to want to hear more in the form of gigs & further CDs. There's that pesky future popping into the equation again! Fair enough for all of that, we all need that sort of "validation", and god knows we all need to be operating out of hope rather than despair. But it doesn't mean that the music we make is really going to "matter". Now that's not the point of recording, but then again, you're wondering, if I'm reading you correctly, why so many jazz records today aren't that distinctive. It's because the people making them aren't. Doesn't meant that they're invalid as people or musicians, just means that what I read in a comic strip long ago is true - "Remember - you're unique. Just like everybody else." And I'll apply that to my own recordings. The two QO sides were both labors of love, and I'm proud to have made them. But I'll not kid myself by pretending to think that they're anything other than vanity projects, things that we documented because we wanted/needed them to be documented. Even if somebody else had felt that want/need, how big a fool would I have to be to think that our music was anything other than a small drop in a vast ocean that evaporates and replenishes drops routinely and without concern? No, we loved the music, we played it out of love, and we documented it out of love. But to think that we did it simply to "capture the moment" would be naive. We did it because A) we thought we mattered and needed to prove it to ourselves B) we hoped that the documents would build for the future & C) nobody had a day job at the time. It would also have been naive for anybody, especially us (although this wasn't the most musically, uh..."cosmopolitan" group...), to have thought that we were making music that was anything other than a response to things much bigger and much older than us. To us it was "new" in some sense, but as far as the overall jazz scene, it was definitely "inside-out" (or what ever you call it), and nothing too radical at that. It's a sign of the scene that some people found us "avant-garde". HA! We weren't raising any new possigilities, and we certainly weren't asking any new questions. Hell, we were struggling just to answer some fairly old (in jazz trems) ones! And that's where I think most of today's jazz musicians are today - the legacy is so deep at this point that it's all too easy to get weighed down by it and to feel that you've got to "honor" it in some form or fashion. And when you get to that point, you start, quite unconsciously, to make music about jazz rather than jazz itself (indeed, this happens with any music, I think, other than that which is entirely functional). I've only recently begun to see the ultimate futility in this myself. I'd convinced myself that I was a "jazz musician" who belonged in the "jazz world", and if that world was a small-getting-smaller one, it was like that because the rest of the world was wrong, a bad place to be avoided at all costs. Any pleasures to be found there had to be wrong, because everything about it was wrong. Well, the rest of the world is wrong in a lot of ways about a lot of things, but that doesn't mean that we're any less wrong ourselves, and it doesn't mean that the world's pleasures are not there to be had by us too. We're as out of touch as the world is overly wired-in. We're as insular as the world is promiscuous. We're as closeminded in our highly focused broadmindedness as the world is ignorant of everything by having all of it at they're disposal. We're as wrong for being hellbent on defining who we are by who we aren't as the world is for willing to be any thing at any time because it's the thing to do. We're as wrong for mocking the party from the outside as the world is for going to into it thinking that it's real. In short, we've become prisoners of our own making as well as prisoners of external circumstances. Not too much we can do about the latter until we fix the former. There are a few (or more) beautiful exceptions, but if you're wondering why new release after new release sounds like they sound, that's my answer. And here's my solution - Fuck "jazz". Fuck "music". Fuck anything and everything except life lived without fear. Then let's see what songs demand to be sung, and then let's sing the hell out of them.

I'm deeply inspired by my late father damn near every day. But I don't wear his clothes.

Diner. Mickey Rourke.

Well of course I'm talking about the future. No sense trying to shape the musical past, because it's already happened. And no sense talking about shaping the musical right now, because as soon as it's here, it's gone. So what else you got left? You want a bridge between the past and the future? I gave it to you. I didn't say forge about the music (in fact, I specifically said not to! I said forget about what it's all "supposed" to be. Big difference. Look - if you've been touched, really touched, by jazz, or by any music, it'll be a part of you. This music's spirit has been too strong to just pass away. But the body that spirit's been being delivered is like any other body - it ain't gonna last forever w/o some unnatural assistance. To ensure a healthy body for that beautiful spirit, it's going to have to stop being about "style", because that's missing the point entirely about what it was about in the first place, which was relating to life through a music that best provided a vehicle for doing so for the people making it. I know we still got plenty of people who best relate to 2006 life by 1956/1966/etc. music but when it gets to be as literal as it so often gets, is that really relating to life by engaging it head-on or by avoiding it to one degree or another? Is the demand for certain "criteria" to be net ultimately just a fetish of some sort, maybe even an avoidance mechanism? If it is, that's cool, I suppose, but I'd like to make the modest suggestion that if where you're from is dictating where you are (or, especially, where you're going) too much past the point of giving you an individual flavor with which to go forth, then, unless you're heading down the homestretch of life, you're really not going anywhere other than where you've already been. Might as well sit around and look at the photo albums all day. But if you do that for too long, don't be surprised if later on in life all the pictures of you in those photo albums will be of you looking at old photos. Is that a life well-lived?

Yeah? Then what the hell does it mean to a woman? Touche, Mr. Gould! I still like the "nature and time making love to each other" thing, and for exactly that reason.

To your first point, I would say that I'm not so sure. You take a labellike Sharp Nine, and I don't think that "extending" is what they're all about. They're more of the "once good, always good" school Or you might call it the Keeping it alive" mentality. I'm not here to argue for or against that point, just to point it out. Then you got the labels and artists who position themselves as "contemporary" or some such by combining elements of free and inside. There's certainly validity there imo, and some oftne interesting enough music. But really - is combing 40 year old music with 50 year old music really pushing the envelope, or is it just getting around to some overdue cleanup work? I can see where the labels promoting this type thing are sincere in thinking that they're "extending", because it is a type music that's not been done to death already. But again, it's an "extension" only to those so deep on the inside of the jazz world that that the rest of the music world (or the world's music) is uninteresting, unknown, and/or irrelevant. It's a weird world, that one, because the sincerity and dedication is inspiring as well as noble. But, geez, it's a big world, and relevance only to self is only going to matter so much in it. And that goes to your second point - you're saying, I think, that "originality" and "innovation" maybe ought to be given more consideration than they are currently being given. Well, part of me hears you loud and clear, part of me says that you can only be who you are, and part of me knows deep down inside that this whole "jazz culture" has gotten so neurotic & inbred, musically and mentally, that they type of originality and innovation that we'd both no doubt like to see is going to take a lot more than the conviction that honor is all it takes. Me being past my prime and shit, but still caring a great deal about the music itself, I'd like to issue this challenge to all young players - forget about "jazz". Forget you've ever heard it. Forget all the names, histories, etc. Now here's the catch - do that with all the other music you've heard and learned about over the years. All of it, from the oldest to the most recent. Now, here's the final catch - don't forget about the music itself, just forget what it's called, and forget that it matters which is which. Now, after you've done all that, just play what you know, hear, and feel. Don't worry about what fits and what doesn't fit. If you can't make a singer hear how to fit in with those those Trane licks that aren't fitting over the hip-hop beat with the power chords underneath and the drummer's forays off into Sunny Murrayland, don't sweat it. If you all truly feel it & hear it, you'll find a way to make it fit, eventually. Just fit it, don't force it. Let it fall into place on its own terms, not yours. Once you get there, go out and play it for people who don't know or care about "types" of music. Play it for motherfuckers who don't know A-Flat from A Train from Aaliyah from AA from AAA from A Love Supreme. Play it for them and see if they dig it. If they don't maybe it's just because they're some ignunt motherfuckers. Or it may be that you ain't playin' shit. You gonna have to figure that one out on your own. Just don't rush to judgement either way. But if they do dig it, hey you might be on to something. You might have found some music that's not either consciously or subconsciously trying to live up to its parents out of a latent inferiority complex. And maybe then we can maybe start talking about "21st Century Jazz" as a designation of an actual music instead of a simple chronological designation as to when 20th Century Jazz is being played.

If it were that simple, you could sync up two metronomes & it would swing.

Since you be goin' that direction, how 'bout "Come Go With Me" - Del Vikings. Too bouncy for whitefolkschurch. No news here, but The Fleetwoods had moments where the shit would just shut up and stand still. Doesn't matter to me if the songs themselves were crap (and they almost always were), those moments were...unique.

If I can be serious for a second (and that's a big if...), how about "Our Prayer", the Brian Wilson thing? Do handbells do chromatics? If not, get the choir to do it. It's a beautiful little thing, it is.

"Come Softly To Me" by The Fleetwoods, done w/o the dumb "dum-dum, dumby-do-dom-be-doobie" part. The Fleetweood were a human handbell choir unto themselves.

Some things defy any rational explanation. Ron Carter's consistently inconsistent intonation is one of them.

Ah, but the future is merely tomorrow's today.

The differnce being that in each case, the question of the then-current decade would have been in response to the previous decade's question having been answered in, by and large, no uncertain terms. Some of us have been asking this question for at least 20 years and still don't have a satisfactory answer, which is, I think, shaping up to be a going-to-have-to-be-satisfactory-whether-we-like-it-or-not answer...

Oh, it's a team effort, belive me....

21st Century Jazz will be what the 21st Century Jazz Audience(s) want it to be. Until somebody comes up with a music that is so obviously of the times that it can't be denied, look for more of the same, simply because that's what people want to hear. That means the opptions are classicism of superior technique in the service of material based on past premises (which is not to say that that material can't be quite "challenging"), the eternal greeeeeeeze, the eternal free, and Smoooooooooooth. Our times have changed in some pretty fundamental ways. The way we percieve "reality" now is every bit as different as the "reality" which is perceived, probably more different. Sure, the fundamental things still apply as time goes by, but the context in which those things happen is a whole lot more "multi-tasked" than it once was. In a world where people routinely do 15 things at once while being bombarded by 30 other things at the same time, the only "relevance" that some guy standing in front of a rhythm section playing changes in an acceptable-enough manner is going to have is that of a quaint reminder of how things used to be. Either that, or as comfort food for people who just can't get with These Newfangled Modern Times. But after they die off... The challenge is not to discover new information. This music already has all the information it needs, probably all it's going to get in it's current mindset, and definitely more than "most people" are equipped to handle. So the challenge now is to discover ways to deliver that information. And I'm not talking about delivering "product", I'm talking about the information in the music itself, the thoughts, emotions, languages, all that stuff. You know, the substance of the music. Finding a vehicle to effectively communicate this information in a way that keeps it alive and vital instead of archival is something that a lot of people my age (roughly) just don't want to deal with. They seem to think that it's always been about "keeping it real", not realizing that "real" is a function of content, not of style. In a digital reality, analog reality is going to have a hard time being heard. We neep the information, but change the delivery method, if anybody can think of such a thing without feeling that they're betraying The Great Traditon. I mean, it's cool to get a group together, play tunes/compositions, and everybody solos, but that's increasingly going to become the equivalent of spending an hour writing a letter when your kids have spent that same hour sending and receiving about 25,000 text messages, a few of which actually will lead to meaningful activity before you've even put a stamp on the envelope. Never mind getting it in the mail and waiting for it to be delivered. Your kids will have used that time to have made their first million. Ok, I jest/exaggerate, but I am serious about this- "soloing" is not going to be what the 21st century is about, at least not as a be-all-end-all, nor is a succession of "song forms". That might be where the information was discovered, but unless we find a more relevant way to deliver it, that's also going to be where it dies. That would be a true tragedy, but how many people are thinking that far ahead? How many are looking to the music to deliver today's headlines (don't tell me about "timelessness" and all that. "Timelessness" comes after, not before, the music delivers)? And how many people, including musicians, are using "jazz" as an oasis of "sanity" in times that just don't make sense to them? Tell you what - the "times" ain't going to be anything other than what they will be. Deal with that and proceed accordingly. And besides - if, in 2006, we're having to ask what "21st Century Jazz" is going to be like in, if we don't already have any really readily apparent leads as to where the music as a whole is going that's where it hasn't already been, isn't that kind of...uh....an answer in itself?

Seems like the whole Argo catalog (or a big bunch of it) got a reissuing w/B&W covers somewhere in the 70s. Some of 'em even had no back notes, just a repeat of the front cover. But I think they were legit, if shoddy.

Does it smell fishy down there?

Please do, because I have been paying attention to all of the above (including the edited-out-of-the-quote Branford, and I'm not excited. Entertained in varying degrees, yes, but excited? Nah, not even a little. And I live to be excited. So what am I missing?

My heart sings a song with a melody not yet composed.

I think Clem was oxygenated perfectly well myself...