JSngry

I think I'm going to check this one out. I'd also like to hear objections to the concept that go beyond the facile "they're just doing it for the money" and/or "the originals are fine as they are" and/or "it's just pop music anyway, no sense in polishing a turd" etc. Well, yes. And no. Mostly, for me, the latter. I'm of an age, time, and place where I can honestly say that seeing The Beatles on the Sullivan show for the first time back in '64 changed my life, put me on a course that led me to being who I am today. I can also honestly say that it's not an uncommon phenomenon to have the past all sort of start to blur together as you get older. There's probably some psychological/neurological phenomenon that does that to keep us sane, just as we condense all our old belongings into scrapbooks, photo albums, etc. instead of us constantly buying bigger houses to hold it all (although there's a few freaks...). After a while, you just don't have room for it all, so you cull. I see the mashup element as a perfectly legitimate way of doing this. In fact, I see it as culling in a proactive, creative way. No way it's meant to "replace" the originals, but it does seem a good way to go about the business of clearing up/out some of the psychic space. Mash it all up, (re)mix it all together, turn three songs into one. Kinda like condensing files on your hard drive to open up more free space. Kinda. Anyway, I jsut wish that the Soul Source Jackson 5 remix projects would have gotten this much publicity, because although there's significantly less of the mashup thing going on there, there's also (probably) a helluva lot more "creative reinvention" going on. But that's hoping for too much, I know. All I can say is that until the Pop music for the new world crystalizes (well, it already has, thank you, Monday, but nobody's listening yet...), I'd rather hear creative de/re-construcuctions that pick our pockets by attempting to make something new (like a "perspective") out of something old than I would endless literal recyclings of old literalisms that attempt little more than to pick our pockets by trying to convince us that nothing's changing. Yeah, I think I'm going to check this one out.

That kinda reminds me of something I heard David Baker say once. He was telling how he used to preach to all his students that they had to master playing changes before they started playing free because you can't move on to the new before you fully understand the old. Well, one day he had a student who challenged him on that by asking him if he had mastered Kid Ory & Jack Teagarden before he got into JJ. Well, of course he hadn't. So Baker said that that was when he changed his stance to one of preaching that you merely should be respectably familiar with the past before going about the task of trying to invent the future. That's good advice for a player, no doubt. I mean, hey - if you spend all your time getting the old shit together, you'll never get into your own world, if only because the past consists of so many full and complete lives that trying to fit them all into one -yours - is neither cost/time efficient nor (meta)physically possible - it's like trying to put the Empire State Building into a Ziploc. Even with one of those bigass gallon ones, there's not enough room to put it all in... For people who don't play, it's probably not nearly as essential a dictum, In fact, I know it's not. But if we can all agree that curiosity can be fun, and that expansion of knowledge (like eating your vegetables ) won't kill you and might even lead to discovering a treat or two you'd not have discovered otherwise, then there's some validity to it. That's then more about a general mindset & life philosophy than it is any rigid musical dogma, and I think we'd all agree that having fun with an open mind is a helluva lot more preferable than "doing the right thing" out of a sense of guilt and/or fear.

Hey, I figured as much. We're cool.

How about Untitled? The Stroker sounds kinda...kinky. As does Uncle Rough. Although, if you put that French domanatrix on the cover... Seriously, Free Flow sounds like a title that might have made to the streets it during that time, especially since it's the leadoff tune.

You know, I understand all that, and I'm ok with all that. The only thing that bugs me is when somebody gives off the vibe that they're not missing anything by having limited areas of interest and/or wide areas of disinterest. I mean, I've got plenty of holes in my knowledge of jazz, and even bigger ones about muisc in general. But I try to get at least a taste of everything to make sure that I'm not missing something that would turn out to be really important to me. When I decide that something can be let go of, it's not a casual decision, and I certainly don't classify such music as "unimportant" in general. It's just something that I myself have decided is not going to offer me what I need at this point in time. And I make that decision fully aware that I might be wrong. So when I hear people who consider themselves "serious" music fans casually dismissing any music that is by general informed consensus "important" or even "great", that bugs me. I can't respect that, not at all. Call yourself what you are - a fan of certain, limited areas of music, and let it go at that. That's not something to be ashamed of, but it's nothing to be chest-thumpingly proud about either. Be honest with and about yourself. I can respect the hell out of that.

It wasn't the "ownership" thing that bugged me. It was the "not a regular point of reference for my own thinking, I don't feel the loss." thing. That just seemed....wrong, both in reality and in spirit. Look, I'm at a "turning point" in my own musical evolution. Right now, "jazz" is rapidly fading as something I want to spend the rest of my life involved in, at least in the sense of continuing to look backwards in hopes of finding what lies ahead. I'm getting greater stimulation these days from things that have little if anything to do with "jazz" as a codified style (and that includes the "avant-garde", which has in its own ways become largely a codified set of gestures & techniques). But that's "jazz" as a style/genre, and there's so much more to music than that. There's the matter of spirit, of life. There are certain figures from the realm of "jazz" who for me will always embody the spirit of what I want my life to be about, and Bird, Duke, & Louis are certainly among them. I can't imagine living a life, not just a musical life, but a life in general, not deeply informed by the spirit of these men. No matter where I end up going & end up doing, I'm taking these guys with me. I couldn't lose them if I tried. Now, I wouldn't necessarily "feel the loss" if I had never felt it in the first place. But I have, and I suspect you have too. It just seems wrong to me to attempt to downplay it or attempt to minimalize it. I know that when you trumpet the Great Men Iconologyline that you run the risk of stepping over into Wyntonland, and that's the last thing I want to do or encourage. But the secret of success for all great deceptions is to be rooted in the truth and then to twist the interpretation of that truth, and the secret of defeating that deception is to reclaim the truth from those who have stolen it. Life is for building, and you gotta build from a foundation. A foundation built on, say, Lacy, will be strong, because Lacy was strong. A foundation build on Lacy built on Monk will be even stronger, and a foundation built on Lacy built on Monk built on Ellington will be stronger still, etcetcetc. And I do believe that the stronger the foundation, the farther out you can branch (and that you should branch, as far, or farther, than you think possible), and that in doing so, you very much have your foundations as a a regular point of reference for your own thinking, if only through subliminal/musical genetic memory. I also think that certain forces in life are so inevitable that if you're on a certain path you're going to meet them at some point, whether you're looking for them or not, and that once met, they must be confronted and dealt with, if only in the sense of understanding them in order to avoid being imprisoned by them. Might as well be ready.

Finally somebody else recognizes the genius of "Up Up & Away"! Love ya' for that, Maria.

Well, sometimes it takes me a while to get to the point...

And it's not about how many Bird, Duke, Louis, etc. records you have or don't have in your collection. That is so not the point. It's about knowing the spirit of these men, for their spirit is the spirit of the music, even now. If you only have one 78, that's enough - if you feel it. Because this music isn't about "records", it's about spirit. Hell, it is spirit. And for these men's spirit's to not be "a regular point of reference" for your - or anybody's - thinking is damn near impossible unless your spirit is not that of the music. Now, whether you choose to realize that or not is your call. But choosing not to see something doen't make it not there.

Went through the CJB set last night and was a little suprised at how "corny" some of it was. Not corny in a bad way, though. "Hip corny", if that makes any sense. "Retro-modern", if you like. Shouldn't have been surprised, that type of corniness comes with Mulligan, it's OEM, but I was anyway, probably because it's been so long since I listened with any duration or intent to this type of music. The distance set off what I had probably in the past been too close to notice. Good set. Glad I bought it. Makes me realize I'm not as old as I used to be.

Ok, you're hubristic. Look - if you take this music seriously (not "seriously" as in as a hobby, or as an "area of serious interest", or as anything like that, but seriously as in as serious as your life - now there's a hip catch phrase to drop to impress people...) then there are certain foundations around which you simply do not - can not - dance around. You can dance around everything around those foundations to one degree or another, but not them themselves (and those foundations don't stop at Louis, Duke, & Bird. Not by a long shot). Fact of life. If you - or anybody - thinks that you can, then you're full of shit. And I say that out of love, because I love y'all too much to tell you a lie. Now, if you - or anybody else - doesn't want to go there for whatever reason, hey, fine. It's not a law that you have to, your life can still be blessed w/o doing it. We can certainly still be friends, and I'll still feel the love, because I know that the level of seriousness that I'm talking about is very much a "specialized" thing. It's not a "fan" thing, not even slightly (and being a "fan" is a beautiful thing, don't get me wrong). But specialized or not, it's real, hell, it's necessary, and all the wishing and hubristicism in the world won't make it not so. Just don't insult anybody, especially yourself, by thinking otherwise.

Would you envy me if I told you I had one of the Warner Brothers LP boxes? Same thing, I think, only it's a box set. And "fancier". And we all know how much better music is when it comes in a fancy box set.

The zeitgeist remains unchanged.

Is there anybody else who could have made this record? No.

But are you surprised?

Gracias.

Thrilling. That's why I posted it dude... I guess I should have added one of those silly faces to add to the comic effect. Well yeah, that's where I figured you were coming from -- guess I should have posted a smiley, too? Could y'all please clue in somebody who doesn't want to install the Mozilla Active-X Control what this is all about?

Exactly. It's an ongoing saga, and not everybody's playing the same game at the same table for the same stakes. But the game is being played. However, "Kramer" is not cut out to be our National Healer. Duh.

Group hug!

Contrary to what my kids' generation likes to think, racial language in this culture has not yet reached an across-the-board "anything goes" level. Both of my kids have friends, good friends, from across the ethnic/racial spectrum, and the way I hear them mutually drop what in my days would have been grounds for a good ass whuppin' gives me a serious case of the s. To everybody's credit, they seem to know that that type stuff is not for "general public consumption". And in a way, I'm glad that they're realizing that taking ownership of the language can be used to neuter it just as easily as it can to empower it. I know all these kids, and to them, it's their way of mocking the world they've come into. There's an ease to how all these kids of diverse cultural backgrounds come together with a unified spirit that's more than a little encouraging. When I was their age, it took effort (and sometimes courage) to form the type of bonds that they assume as their birthright. And hell yeah, that's beautiful. But on the other hand (and this is what I stress to them, even though it comes off as eye-rollingly "parental", but oh well about that...), what the hell is wrong with killing something off by just letting it die by attrition? There was a world long before any of their little asses hit the streets, and the sticky residue of that world is something that we all have to trudge through every damn day. I doubt that any of them will find it so damn funny in another 5 years or so, once they get out of their little suburban coccoons and the realities of the ongoing legacy of global institutionalized racism hits them. We'll see. In the meantime, giving him the fullest possible benefit of the doubt, Michael Richards ain't no Lenny Bruce.

Great. Now all the rapists & pedophiles will have an excuse...

Bluto Pluto Plato

You had me going there for a second... That is one FUNNY site! How long before it gets shut down?

Hey, I'm still doing weekend road-trip gigs involving driving anywhere from 4-8 hours each way with only a few hours left for some cheap sleep before going back in to work on Sunday nights, and I'll be 51 here pretty soon. My advice is to go for it, because you're going to be dead eventually anyway. You can sleep then.

King Sunny Ade K. Abe Asid Ace