JSngry

I don't need any convincing that African retentions are very real or prevalent (I grew up in the rural American South, remember, and once I "discovered" real African music, culture, etc., a lot of things from my youth came into focus, and a lot of things I was to encounter had a much clearer context). My point is that these retentions are in place in spite of attempts to destroy them by the dominant culture, and that that "in spite of" makes for a different way of "being" than having a conscious knowledge of the links would, both in terms of how the retentions are executed and how the "new world" is percieved. Neither one is exactly "crystal clear", if you know what I mean. How could they be? And Cary's comments on the "rural"-ness of it all, for both black and white, are spot on, although ever since satellite TV and the internet became more common, the number of people who remain in that type of total isolation seems to be shrinking dramatically (and rapidly). The "old way" is no longer the only way, and you know that's going have an effect. However, if you seek hard enough, you can still find...

DWB is still a crime in many communities...

I'm checking out the samples on cduniverse right now. It's....um. Jim's review is fairly accurate. I think the trombone player (at least, I think that's a trombone, though it sounds a little like a buzzsaw) only learned how to play one note. At the time of this recording he was evidently still working on getting that one in tune... edit: Please tell me that's at least a trombone and not a tenor saxophone. Please. I'm starting to lean toward it being a bass washboard. Try to find and listen to a recording of ivory trumpet orchestras of the Senufo people of West Africa - same procedure: each player plays rhythmic patterns of only two or three notes to compose interlocking patterns. We speakers of German are lucky to be able to read a scientific report of renowned Austrian jazz scholar, Alfons Michael Dauer, who researched the roots of early jazz in African orchestral traditions - these Folkways recordings are among the sources he analyzed. The intonation of these guys is purely African, not Western, and clearly intentional - they perceive tonalities in a totally different way. It's not primitive, but just an entirely different conception of all aspects of music - I thought the times of calling non-Western musical cultures based on different tonal and rhythmic concepts "primitive" was over ..... It's not primitive... A horse drawn plow isn't entirely primitive either Mike. I think you've missed my point. I guess I should have said "Beyond 'primitive', like a horse and plow." If you are comparing a mortar and pestle with a Cuisinart, it is fair to describe the mortar and pestle as primitive. These two devices are not entirely interchangeable however. In my mind, the mortar and pestle is just as brilliant, if not moreso, than the electric-powered machine that came centuries later. Is a horse drawn plow less brilliant, or less innovative than a tractor plow? I still think the horse drawn plow is the real innovation. Still, to find a cropper using a horse drawn plow in the age of Industry would seem primitive. This music is the equivalent of a horse drawn plow in a world of tractors. To me, anyway. A lot of the music coming from this region of the United States, even to this day, is primitive when compared to its contemporary. In my mind, this doesn't make it any less valuable, or enjoyable. You're both right! Sorta... This isn't a recording of the Senufo people of West Africa playing indigenous music on indigenous instruments, it's a recording of two rural, extremely rural, brass bands playing mostly hymns/spirituals on instruments that they obviously used because that's what was available to them and because that's the "format" their environment supported. The concept no doubt is a result of residual Africanisms, but the actual excution of this particular material on these particular instruments betrays a lack of "knowledge" about anything even remotely resmebling "Western knowledge" about same. So in that sense, yeah, it's fair to call it "primitive", in a non-perjorative way. Except that "primitive" doesn't even begin to describe it. Seems to me that these guys weren't in the least bit concerned about what they didn't know. Seems to me that, in 1954, years of life in the rural American South would've pretty much eliminated any conscious knowledge of African practices (at least, not that would have been consciously identified as such). So to think that we're hearing an intentional implementation of "native" practices is probably stretching credulity. But - to think that we're not hearing some sort of residual expression of same isn't. But "residual" is about as far as it goes. The ugly truth is that most of these guys were probably one or two generations, at most three, removed from slavery. And their locale seems to indicate that they were people who stayed close to home once legal slavery was eliminated. So, we're hearing people who survived the hideous cultural brianwashing that accompanied slavery and who, probably, never bothered to get too far out into the rest of the world to see who/what else they could in fact be. Most likely, they stayed put. What that means to me is that this is music made very much by instinct, and by an instinct that was "neither fish nor fowl" in terms of being either African or American. The Africanisms seem to be entirely residual, as if they were what remained of a failed attempt to airbrush an entire negative into oblivion. The Americanisms seem to be akin to looking at a blurry picture of something that you don't know what it really is, but you think you might have a rough idea, so you go with it and at it as best you can. It's certainly not "sophisticated" music by any stretch of the imagination, or by any definition of the word. Cats in Africa could do what these guys were likely trying to capture in their sleep, if you know what I mean. And by any "Western" standard, "sophisticated" wouldn't even make the bottom of the longest list of possible adjectives. But it's exactly that hazy mixture of a world almost totally forgotten with a world almost hardly known that makes this such powerfully fascinating music for me. Out of the African Diaspora, how many people found themselves confronting this strange, cruel new world with exactly this same perspective before finding a stronger, more focused voice? More than we know, I'm sure. Yet how much of this is documented? Work songs? Nah, a perspective had already been formed byt he time they were documented, even the most "primitive" ones. Spirituals? Same thing. Country blues? Forget about it - as raw as some of that stuff was, it still had a clear musical and social perspective. Maybe, maybe some of the early rural African-American string band music that's been documented. but even that's from a different geographical region, one that was not as oppressive as rural Alabama (mountains make for a different, less malevolent, isolation than do forests...). Of course, this is all speculation on my part. But it's easy for me to see this music as a rare glimpse of what "the picture" of Southern African-American music looked like just before it began to come into focus in all its myriad forms. It's as this is what goes on in somebody's mind just before they start to walk. Considering all the magnificent steps that proceeded to come once the walking got underway, this glimpse of the pre-walk is nothing short of precious. Like I said, it will fuck you up.

Would very much like to hear a clean copy of this one...

Think remember hearing a few of them. Pretty fluffy as I recall.

Is "abominated" really a word?

I believe you mean redundancy. But neverthenonetheless... This "depth" you keep refering to, what is it? Is it a journey to find what is already, for some, intuitively known? If it is, then I say more power to the hip! We waste too much time looking for stuff that's already there. And when we find it, what do we do with it? Hold it up like it's some kind of trophy? "Hey, look what I found!" Well, good, you looked at the ground long and hard and finally discovered your feet! Now is it time to begin walking and running? Better get busy, some poor fools have been doing that w/o ever having made that discovery. Better find them and shame them for not knowing what they do! Of course, I oversimplify. And yes, I loathe the faux-hip. But hipness, true hipness, is definitely real, and hipness is beautiful. Lester Young was hip. Louis Armstrong was hip. And Dexter Gordon was hip. The "depth" comes not from their "intellectualality", it comes from their spirit, from how they found the beauty in life, in all of life, even the dark stuff. That is definitely deep afaic. Now sure, Dexter was often highly medicated, and sure, sometimes, often even, his level of medication left him running on autopilot. There's more than a few recorded examples of that. Dexter Blows Hot And Cool is one of the most depressing sides I've ever heard (and the cover photo ain't no bouquet of roses either...), and the Newport 72 Jam Session ranks a close second (seldom have I heard such empty rambling at such great length from such a major talent). Dexter was not someone to let not being particularly frisky keep him from running the marathon, if you know what I mean. But oh well. You got the Dial sides, you got Go, you got Our Man In Paris, you got The Chase, you got the Black Lion sides, you got the Steeplechase studio sides, you got a legacy of beautiful, beautiful ballads from all eras. At some point you gotta ask yourself, was this a cat who was at root a blowhard who occasionally got lucky, or was this a cat who really had it going on and too often partied too hard for his own good? Based on the evidence, and the comparing the strength of the good/great stuff to the emptiness of the bad, I gotta with the latter. When it's good, it's too damn good to be a fluke, and when it's bad, it's not because it's at root bad, it's just because it ain't firing on all cylinders (no doubt due to over-loadedness). We should all have such a problem. Of course, mileages can and do vary on that, and ok. I'm just at the point in life, though, that hearing joy, heavy joy, not simple "fun, but deep, from the bowels of the soul joy being dismissed as shallow or some such raises a red flag or two for me. There ain't enough of it to be had these days, and I don't see that as progress, much less as a positive. At its best, life is a dance. At it's worst, life tries to take your dance away from you. Dexter was always dancing. Even when he wobbled and stumbled, it was because he was too high to dance, not because he didn't have the dance in him anymore. He always had the dance in him. I gotta love that.

Yes, 7/4 that was somewhat what I meant.

Ya' know, I always get the impression that Dexter was one of those guys who could instantly surmise any given situation in terms of what it was, what it could or could not become with who all was involved and BAM - figure out how he could make it work to his advantage. Most folks would go along and try to figure it out along the way, getting it right sometimes and wrong others, but Dexter seemed like he knew in advance what the outcome of any given scenario could be if he worked it right, so why waste time, why not just cut to the chase and let the good times roll? My guess that this is the POV that informed both his music and his personal life, and maybe that's what some hear as "glib"? Could be, but, again, it seems to me that it's an intuitive grasp of the essence, and a welcoming embrace of that intuitiveness. Hipness. Except for when he guessed wrong in California and spent all that time in the pen. That was not very hip...

Let me hasten to add that yes, I do find much of Dex's playing to be "glib", although I'd not extrapolate that into "superficiality". Part of Dexter's trip was indeed being a party-er, and there were definitely times when it seems that he felt that creating the party was enough. And frankly, when you're that damn hip, I'm not so sure that sometimes it isn't.

Well, how deep is "deep enough"? To me, Dexter grasped the essence, perhaps even embodied it, and I don't know that you can get any deeper than that. More elaborate, yes, but deeper? I don't know... Sometimes we spend our time looking for something that's already there, only we can't see it because it's not where/what/how we think it's going to be. To this end, I don't think that you could ask any more out of Dexter's playing than what you get, because, at his best, he had it all, and he was just so damn direct and natural with it all. No struggle, no sense of "quest", no nothing except just extremely hip tenor playing and enormous charisma, both musically and personally. He was indeed a "natural", if we can use that word w/o having it imply that there was no work done offstage to master the craft. I've transcribed enough of his stuff to know that the inner workings of it are quite sophisticated w/o being "complex", and to me, that signifies refinement, not glibness. Again, a grasping, perhaps intuitive, of the essence. Now, of course, Dexter was nothing if not slick (hipness, true hipness, reqquires one to be slick, otherwise,what's the point?), but never do I get the impression that this guy was fronting. No, if anything, I'm always left with the impression that he knew more than he told, and that he found a way to signify this deeper knowledge by implication, not through ostentation. A very "non-verbal" form of communication, if you will, a way to be at once totally direct yet layered with nuance that is intuitively felt more that intellectually "known". Personally, I think that's pretty damn cool. And deep. But I understand that mileages may vary on this. All I can say is that one marginalizes the depth of Dexter Gordon at the risk of missing the point of his whole trip. Whether or not that trip is one that one finds personally appealing or not is one thing, but denying it altogether is something else. Proceed with caution!

OK, young master charles got his video ipod for christmas and he was all excited that all the videos that he had on his computer were going to be able to go to his ipod.....WRONG. Apparently the ipod only supports mpeg4 video and all of his videos are either mpeg2 or wmv or quicktime. Does anyone know where we could find a free piece of encoder software so that he wont have to spend $30.00 for quicktime pro? Thanks!

Young Master Charles is all hot & bothered about the new fiber-optic internet service from Verizon. Me, I'm kinda burnt out on the V-Lords, as their track record over the years has left me unimpressed, to put it mildly. However, what looks cool about this FIOS thing is that they wire the fiber-optic line all the way up into your house. Comcast, our current ISP, goes fiber up to the node, and then coax from there. I've got no complaints, generally, but you know how the young folk are.... Just wondering if anybody's yet taken the plunge on this new service, and if so, what the results have been. The hype is certainly enticing. As always, thanks in advance!

Central Louisiana ain't necessarily moose-friendly environs...

Joya Sherrill Smiley Winters Neils Lofgren

Not perfect, by any means, but if it's real you want...

Nothing but love for LTD here. Which is not to say that he was a "perfect" musician. Far from it. When his inspiration was lagging for whatever reason, he could be somewhat tedious, falling back on his stock phrases and quotes, and sometimes just falling, period. (Although, in his later years, his playing so far behind the beat as to be able to sneak up on it from behind and bite it in the ass is one of the more mind-boggling defiances of the laws of physics of the 20th century...) But geez, when he was on, what a spirit he had, and what a spirit he projected. And that's what draws me into his world, his spirit. It's a spirit that's all about feeling good (by any means necessary) and letting the good times roll, what with that bigass sound (one of the biggest ever, actually, and equally big all over the horn - any tenor player who is turned off by that might want to check themselves for "feelings of inadequacy", if you get my drift...) and that irresistable rhythmic momentum of his. But this "feel goodness" was never naive - Dex was a very direct player emotionally, not a lot of emotional ambiguity in his playing, to be sure, but his directness was always delivered with a harmonic hipness and general "knowingness" that belied no little personal and musical sophistication. Not for nothing was he such an influence on so many. The cat knew his shit, and his shit was hip. In fact, to me Dexter is the very embodiment of hipness. Now, in some circles, it's no longer hip to be hip, because hipness requires both the cynicism of recognizing that reality is pretty much fucked and the internal joy & optimism to not let it get in the way of your enjoying life anyway. And that's a pretty tall order these days, it seems, being able to groove in spite of all the bullshit. Cynicism has become the driving force, and the source of the joy itself, not the irritant that produces the joy as a reaction. It's easier to despair, or mock, or both. Or so it too often seems to me. But I'm an old-fashioned guy, I suppose, and the old school notions of hip still work for me. Put me down as somebody for whom it's the only way to make it through the day, and put me down as somebody who is deeply, profoundly, and fundamentally inspired by Dexter at his best. As for Dexter at his not-so-best, oh well. Nobody bats 1.000, and nobody never strikes out. As for the substance use/abuse, hey - it's a fine line between use and abuse, and again, nobody bats 1.000, and nobody never strikes out. If you live through it, you can draw your own conclusions. If you don't live through it, them's the breaks. And if you never go there at all, you haven't a clue one way or the other. "Nuff said. Nothing but love for LTD here.

The only word that whollyadequately describes Elvin is "Elvin".

When you get a chance, can you see what was up on 12-14-55? Thanks!

World B. Free Eartha Kitt Janet Planet

Floyd Cramer Boots Randolph Chet Atkins

Jimmy Giuffre's trios w/Hall? Although, I believe that Chico's groups came first.

Some people are string-phobes. Their loss.

Boyd Dowler Bill Cowher William Cowper

Glen Glenn Cambell Brown Clifford Jarvis