JSngry

Douglas MacArthur Richard Harris Jimmy Webb

That was you? Yeah. And that was you? Who was the chick DJ, what was her name? Cathy? She used to act like she loved to play it. Whether she really did or not, I don't know. But she'd play it.

Do we have to? No. Whew! Thank god. You don't have to.

To show you how times have changed, I used to call in a request for "The Creator Has A Master Plan" at least twice a week to KNTU in my freshman year. I had just dicovered the piece, and was awestruck by it. Back then, they only played jazz from 7 PM to midnight. The request was always played, and always almost immediately! Today, the thing seems kinda "hippy-dippy", but you still can't fault the basic sentiment (at least I can't). And Pharoah's tone was (and remains) one of the treasures of this music. He's made other albums that I listen to a lot more often and enthusiastically than Karma, but I can't find it in me to say anything bad about this, my first introduction to non-Trane Sanders. The appeal to me today of Karma might be primarily nostalgic and/or "sentimental", but I'm ok with that. Whether or not "The Creator" exists, much less has a "Master Plan" is a notion that time can't help but give some bumps and bruises to. But if there's a better ultimate goal for this life than "peace and happiness throughout the land", I've yet to hear it.

Do we have to? No.

Life is not this complicated.

Will Lee Willie Dixon Dixon Crumpler

I wish more bands would call themselves a Fliptet.

Major Harris Major Lance Morris the Minor

Mister Dynamite Al TNT Braggs Ted Turner

I can't see me lovin' nobody but them for all my life.

Thank you, Neil Sperry.

And furthermore... I think I'm probably(?) on the record more than once about lamenting the decline of optimism and positivism in Popular Music (all Popular Music) over the lst quarter-century or so. But I don't think I've ever viewed it as anything other than a reflection of the decline of those same things in society at large. People will get sold what they will buy, and people will buy what they can relate to. If people are feeling empty and nihilistic, that's the kind of music they'll buy, and that's the kind of music they'll more than happily be sold. If you want apples instead of crabapples, plant an apple tree. If the apple tree won't grow but the crabapple tree will, there's a reason, and it's probably not the fault of the crabapple tree. Now, if you got bad or over-run soil, hey - you got bigger problems than just what's growing out of it.

Sparkplug Silver Trigger

We talk, and with good reason, about the "abandoned inner-city youth". And who's "abandoned" them more than the "typical" jazz musician of the last 25 years? Rather than getting in there and sharing their knowledge and promoting their values, they've gone off to Lincoln Center Land and vent nothing but scorn. The connection to the street has indeed been lost, and when that happens, it is museum time. Of course, there have been (and continue to be) exceptions, but the point remains. Y'all have probably not heard of the late Charles Scott, but he was a Fort Worth bassist/music educator who for years played locally w/Marchel Ivery & Red Garland, a baaaad mothafukkah. One of the last gigs I saw him do before he passed was at a FW jazz/blues festival, and his group was all teenaged kids from his school. He had kids playing beats on plastic tubs, and he had kids rapping in fron of that while he played bass and somebody else (Roger Boykin, maybe) played electric piano behind it all. It was ragged as hell, to be sure, and the "jazz purists" thought that it was a sadly comical performance, but I thought it was beautiful. Here was a guy who knew the old ways reacjing out to the kids, letting them come into his world on their terms. Knowing Scotty, I'm sure that he dropped some science on them along the way, and gave them nothing but positive vibes. Did he spawn any great musicians from doing this? Probably not. Did he give some kids another way of looking at themselves and what their lives could be? Probably so. He's one cat who didn't abandon ship to go off and preach down from on high. I respect the hell outta that. Look, the whole crack/gansta thing is way out of control and has been for decades now. And the media glorification of it all is irresponsible at best, and genocidal at worst. Nobody's arguing otherwise, certainly not me. But to clean all this shit up is going to take something a helluva lot meaningful and substantial than jazz musicians whining about how nobody plays real songs on real instruments anymore. That shit is A)besides the point; and B)going to be about as effective as not watering the grass in order to kill the weeds. Mr. Drew's pain about the condition of his community is real, and his outrage about same is absolutely justified. And shared here, make no mistake. But the real perps are not the musicians and the music they create. the real perps are that nebulous yet very real collection of forces known as "the sytem" that gleefully profits (at all levels) from the death and destruction and the glorification of same. That's who & what Mr. Drew should be ragging on, not lamenting the lost splendors of Pop gone by. Because even when and if this societal shit does get cleaned up, the music ain't never gonna sound the same again. So focus. Focus on survival, and let the music do what it's gonna do anyway..

I was thinking of this guy and hoping that I'd been misinformed somewhere along the way...

Rod Levitt Al Levitt Peter Ind

Cliff Edwards Arthur Godfrey Ima Sumac

Tree Rollins Don Newcombe Robert Oppenheimer

Well, yeah, I feel his pain too. But the specific music he's dogging on is a syptom, not the cause, and I can't help but feel that he's not "getting" the fundamental musical changes (perceptual changes, really) that rap/hip-hop (and lots of other musics) were foreshadowing/reflecting long before the gangsta element came to the fore. Like I said earlier, bemoan the moral decline of society all you want. I'll be there with you (withihnn reason and up to a point). But frame it as such and don't come out with all this "this ain't what I was taught that music was in school" bullshit. You can't teach nuthin in school until it's already happened, so if what's happening right now ain't what you taught in school, best that you draw upon a principle that you should have been taught in school but probably weren't - namely, that today is tomorrow's history - and take it from there, not get all wigged out that the neat road map that you thought was going to unfold suddenly just got blown out the window. Look - I'm old enough (two can play this game!) to remember the early days of rap's first commercial peep throught the cracks. The shit was fun (and it swung like mofo), and the social commentary (when it existed) was delivered with a sense of righteousness. I also well remember the intrigue I felt by the musical methods being used - the sampling, the sequencing, the layering, the collages, all that stuff. This was a new way of looking at and feeling time and one's relationship to it, and it was (and still is, I think) an inevitable perceptual shift in the wake of both the increased power, scope, and omnipresence of electronic communications and digital "reality", where anything can be (or give the illusiona of being) literally anything, at any place, at any time. You can't fundamentally alter the nature of "perceptual reality" like this and expect people, especially young people, not to change as a result. You just can't. Absolutely, the toll/fallout of Reaganomics on the inner-city was immense (and in my mind, morally criminal). But since we're not in the Po;itical Foeum (yet), I'll drop that and go here instead - where inner-city culture goes, the tastes of mainstream American youth culture inevitable follows (the more things change...). And where the mainstream popular American culture goes, Madi$on Avenue inevitably is there to sniff their a$$. That's the weigh of the world. And here we are. Mr. Drew's decency as a human being comes through loud and clear in his article, but like so many jazz musicians, their impotence is at least partially their own fault. Rather than being in sync with their times, they've set themselves apart and/or above them. Jazz has never been a teen-age music (the Jazz Age & the Swing Kids notwithstanding), but it has always had its finger on the pulse of what was happening within its "native" community. Other than the M-Base crew and a few others, who among the "jazz community" was looking at the Hip-Hop Revolution from a perspective of it being the Next Step In African-American Musical Evolution? And how many were following the Jazz Reagan (WM) down his road of claiming the glories of the past as triumphs that they were somehow entitled to claim as their own? What are we suppose to do, Save The Children by taking them to hear a recreation of Fletcher Henderson at Lincoln Center? Give me a fucking break... Shit just don't work that way. Never has, never will. You wanna change the streets, you gotta have street cred. You want street cred, you gotta earn it. You wanna earn it, you gotta get down in it, not preach down to it. It may or may not be too late to save the children. God knows I hope it's not. But it sure as hell is too late to think that ii-Vs and such are the key to doing so. Mr. Drew better wake the fuck up.

BVS RVG FDR

I'll see that and raise it a

Roy Wood Ron Wood Natalie Wood

They weren't, not that I know of. But look at all the non-BN stuff that BN reissues as BN. Wack.

When I was in First grade, a cute little girl named Cathy & I got sent to the principal's office (and given the 3rd degree once there) for a quick little kiss we shared at the water fountain. That was nuts, and this is too. Fear and ignorance go hand in hand, and the bigger one gets, so goes the other.