JSngry

You RULE dude!

My bad. Sorry.

Self imposed I fear. Yep. On all sides.

Pockets are my worst fear. That means no direction ahead (as demonstrated for a while). I hear ya', but I also wonder how much of the pocket-ism is real & how much of it is caused by self-induced & self-sustaining illusions. Too many goddamn shackles...

If I read "Af-Am" one more time, I'm going to puke. Nothing personal, but..... no. Just one of those things. If we want to look backwards to look forwards in a non-necrophilliac kind of way, it seems to me that all great music comes out of a heritage of ritual, including dance. To that end, I'd suggest that the big disconnect of our times is between the "musically intellegent" community & the dance music world. The former is (mostly) too intellectually self-congratulatory to lower itself to the realm of something as common as dance, and the latter has (mostly) been barracaded from musical depth/breadth by a combination of their own myopic/claustrophobic life vision & the self-interests of an industry that needs to discourage true escape in order to keep selling the illusion of it. This needs to change if humanity is going to remain human. People who hate dancing, especially "creative musicians" are dangerous. And so are people who would rather dance than think. You gotta, absolutely must gotta, do both. In some way. However, there are pockets of really creative & vital dance music being made today, the very best of it more creative and vital that all but a thimble full of the "jazz" that's getting made. It still "suffers" from certain (and only certain) "musical limitations", but anybody who thinks that there's not room for such a thing in that music is mistaken. I can feel it, and I can almost hear it. I don't I have the generational/lifestyle "connection" to actually do it, what with me having lived, married, bred, and aged in the Jazz Cave all these years. But surely the blood that can do it is out there.

Bill Barron Savoy/Muse/and others. Could it be done?

Ditto!

Your generation and Jim's and mine (where do we draw the lines?) have already been screwed. That's the deal. Now you have to live with that information. Any idea who the cops are, so you can report the crime? True, we've all been screwed. But the nature of the perps is such that there are ample opportunities (never refused, it seems) for post-screwing screwing. My advice was offered in that light.

I mean, your jazz teachers reward optimism, right? And your jazz teachers are not your friends, right? Do the math.

There is absolutely no reason to be optimistic. None whatsoever. So put that out of your head right now. However, there is love, which is a tempestuous bitch, to put it mildly. But it's a helluva lot better for you than optimism. Enjoy!

Vitriol is a very useful thing in a person your age, especially when they're right. Besides my generation, don't be afraid to tell your generation to go fuck itself too. Tell everybody to go fuck themself. But do it with love.

I disagree with you for the most part. There are still plenty of interesting creative jazz musicians, albeit there are lots more boring clones as you state. You just have to work harder to find them, unlike the past when it now seems like there was a giant on every street corner. "Plenty" & "working harder to find them" is sort of a disconnect for me. I know what you mean, but geez, I've spent many a year doing that work and... the point of diminishing returns seems at hand. Maybe it's just me. But I do wanna hear this ep1str0phy cat once he gets good and pissed off!

You wanna make sure that your generation is not screwed? Stop worrying about being screwed, tell my generation to go fuck itself (we'll be dead soon enough), and make the music in your gut. Not in your brain, but in your gut. Tell your story in your language, and if "we" can't handle it, fuck us. I. for one, will love y'all for it, even if I do or do not "like" the music that ensues.

And are we in some sort of agreement, Chuck, that "new music" doesn't necessarily mean not playing in a pre-existing idiom nearly as much as it means speaking in a personal voice no matter what the idiom? I'm not nearly as bugged by young cats playing hard bop as I am by hearing them play it w/o any intent to do anything other than make the changes and play the licks. And I hear that in a lot of contemporary "free" playing too. For every Shelley Carroll (who's really not "young" any more...), there's literally 100 cloneophone players. It's always been like that, but the ratio continues to expand, with no end in sight, as the cloneophonists have been fortunate enough to have been born into a time when the possibility of a smackdown by a jury of their elders, no longer exists. Too many of the few remainders are happy just to have the company. Death's a bitch that way. I'm to the point now where all I can say is "screw jazz". It was fun while it lasted, it's still fun where it still lives, and the memories are the stuff of dreams, but as an ongoing proposition....nah. It's over, at least as far as what I'm looking for (and used to find pretty regularly). Time to move on. And that.....does not make me sad.

Exactly.

If it's true, it means that young musicians are rejecting old music in favor of even older music. That's kinda sad. But I don't think it's totally true. The younger musicians I come into contact with look at the "avant garde" as one of many "styles" to incorporate into their repertoire. That's kinda sadder. It seems that it's all about learning styles now, not telling personal stories in a personal language. And that's really sad, although that's obviously not a widely shared opinion, which is really sadder. And a lot of people seem to not know the difference,which would be so sad as to make me cry if I still gave a damn, which is rapidly becoming more trouble than it's worth. I'm guess I'm just a sad guy, but I'm happy in spite of it. Go figure.

The Brat Hillrich & Bradsby Bruce Wayne

There's one or two of those musical interludes that are pretty mind-boggling. And there's one or two that aren't. I wonder if there's more of the former in the can. As for the humor, yeah, it wears thin quickly, but there's a good line or two. But the Harris humor is better displayed on A Tale Of Two Cities. Definitely one of those albums to have for the sake of having rather than to listen to, but hey - one of the undisputably great covers of all time:

He did an electronic album for Blue Note in the early 90s, but I've never heard it. Same w/an early 70s thing called Waterbirds. Tome VI is an interesting record.

Well, see, this is where it all gets totally subjective. I don't feel (never have, really) that dance rhythms intrinsically lead to a "hemming in". Quite the opposite, in fact. I find them quite liberating. Not the obvious, heavy-handed dance rhythms that are lowest common denominator tools of hammering into submission domination, but the slinky propulsions that get your mind and soul into a different place by going through your body instead of bypassing it entirely. I've never haqd a problem with that type of dance rhythm, and yes, it existed in the disco era. It wasn't the norm, not by a long shot, but it existed. One of the reasons I started a thread not too long ago about do you dance or not was because I more and more see a resitance to dancing in jazz circles, and it both puzzles me and bugs me for a number of reasons. But that's another matter for another time, maybe... Anyway, I guess if dance rhtyhms per se are not to your liking, or if you find them intrinsically limiting, then yeah, Prime Time is going to leave you wanting something different. Like I said, totally subjective.

Looks like some kind of turkey/vulture (but not turkey vulture) mutation.

Jim Chapin Roy Burns Charles Perry

Yeah - trombonists are getting out of the music business & into the frog hunting business.

I too had a gig last night. There was no trombonist there, but this morning on Top Chef they were cooking frog legs. Lots of frog legs. Coincidence? I think not!