JSngry

It might be a fun exercise to put together a record's worth of nothing but Erroll Garner introductions and then release them as "modern classical piano compositions". There's enough tells for a really keen-eared listener to eventually catch on, but there's more than enough to throw most people off. I mean, even with the knowledge of knowing what record is playing on my turntable, I still have these moments of doubt about maybe they fucked up at the record label and put a wrong track on there. Nice shirt, btw. French cuffs still look good to me.

Let's go back beyond that. I just got back from hearing a REALLY good performance of Beethoven 7, and in the program notes it talks about how plenty of "prominent" people in the music world at that time were appalled by it's "wandering" tonalities and other quirks. One guy said it sounded like Beethoven must have been drunk when he wrote it! And listening to it as best as I could without hearing almost 300+ years of what came after, yeah, I totally get how unsettling it could have been. Our popular musics today are still very tonal, and mostly very diatonic-tonal at that. If they really care about tonality at all, that is, so much of it being more drone/groove based with tonality being something that's just there because hey, people be go for what they know, and if they don't know it, they ain't going for it unless truly inspired to find it. But if you can clear your head of that and recall how basic/predictable even the most "advanced" pop songs tend to be...whoa. Some of this Beethoven shit IS unsettling, where did THAT come from, and why the hell does it go THERE? Point just being (and an admittedly pedantic point it is), there has been "avant-garde" music for as long as music has been about personal choice rather than tribal imperative, because there have ALWAYS been forward thinkers. Once people start to consciously choose, some will chose to move ahead. Pedantic Point - "avant-garde" literally means "advance guard" as opposed to "rear guard". It was a military term before it was an artistic one, and it referred to the troops that went ahead of the rest. The implication is obvious - if they are ahead of the rest, then there IS a rest, they're coming along, be patient. If a group of troops wanders off on their own and nobody comes, they're not ahead of anybody, are they? They lost. They're FUCKED! Allowing this word to assume a permanent value as a noun...think about the implications of that - anything that is "out in front" is by inferencedoomed to be cut off from the natural, organic movement. The "avant garde" ceases to be ahead of the rest, they are made APART from the rest, they're lost, they're FUCKED. Who wants THAT? But also - the "rest" - they are then dis-incentivized to move as well. I ain't a-goin' THERE, noooooooosir, that's where you get KILLED! I'm onna stay right here yessir I am. So yes, vocabulary as retardant, a very real thing, and weaponized in ways both naively and knowingly, never with "good" outcomes. It's harder to hit a moving target, they say. When the people who remember that are the ones aiming at the people who are not remembering that.... And yet, shit keeps evolving anyway. It's not new anymore, this noun-ed avant-garde, and as unpleasant as it may be to some, nobody can really say it's wholly unfamiliar. People have either heard it directly or indirectly. It's there, period. and Beethoven - still avant garde as fuck!

Yeah, using "avant-garde" as a noun instead of an adjective was not the best idea then. It's an even worse one now. Lazy thinking that gets everybody involved off the hook for what they do or don't do in real time.

It was pretty nice. The whole evening was quite enjoyable. Satisfying "present-ness" on the first half, absolute ZONE on the Beethoven - which was conducted with no podium or score, so when the shit started flowing, it looked as organic as it sounded. It felt REAL. This is gonna be fun.

Heading out the door to check out "the new guy:: Fabio Luisi CONDUCTS W.G. STILL Poem for Orchestra F. MARTIN Concerto for Seven Winds, Timpani, Percussion and Strings BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7

I know, spend a vacation wasting time. Not very Avant-Garde!

Not if you have something productive going on, no. Me, I don't, it's a vacation week here.

I'd not want to play the "avant-garde" card too strongly with Talking Heads, but I feel confident in saying that it is impossible to stress just how fucking weird that first album sounded in 1977. No, Psycho Killer was NOT FM radio ready in 1977. The first TH song I heard on FM was "Take Me To The River", and it was weird as fuck compared to the other Rock FM fare of the time (and only got played every once in a while. It, uh....stood out, let's put it that way). They were indeed "ahead of the curve", but the extent to which they actually built that curve themselves cannot be underestimated. A few years ago, I took a week to revisit Talking Heads: 77 and it took me a few days to really get back to that place in my head that had never heard it before, that's how ingrained it has become. It's difficult to remember how the band sounded pre-Eno (and how fucking weird Eno himself seemed in those days). A lot of people, "rock fans" thought the whole thing was a joke. And it was NOT on the radio, not even a little, at least not anywhere I was. No surprise there! Offhand, I can think of four "popular music" records in my lifetime that came on the radio that were like seriously WTF?!?!?!?! - "Good Vibrations", "Dance To The Music", "Chocolate City", and "Flashlight". Those are still four pretty "avant-garde" records when looked at apart from the marketplace. Their constructions, their productions, their whole end game musically was just...off the wall and quite unprecedented (not the components, in their whole). But the public was more than ready, so yeah, they made their own curve and negotiated it perfectly. Sometimes "avant-garde" takes root so fast that it doesn't stay avant-garde all that long. But seriously, how is something like "Chocolate City" anything but avant-garde? That one I had to pull of the road to process. "Avant-garde" as a trailing indicator is basically a self-fulfilling prophecy, whatever the logic term for that is. True "avant-garde" is a leading indicator, it either is or isn't at the time it gets made. I try to imagine hearing Louis Armstrong for the first time, not in my life, but in the culture's life. Just what the hell did THAT sound like, even to people who had already heard "jazz"? I can't begin to imagine the shock that must have been, in any number of ways. Same with Debussy, Stravinsky, even Schoenberg, there is no part of any but the most isolated parts of Western Civilization where those "sounds" are not familiar. Not "popular" mind you, but familiar, that shit's just there, period. Be Bop too. Anyway...Talking Heads: 77 weird as fuck in actual 1977. If you weren't there, it may be impossible to fully understand.

YEAH!

Here, that's not so hard, see? Kate Smith? For me, always a Lenny Bruce punch line.

Let's see if this is any good or not. I kinda like not knowing in advance.

No sense in being stuck with shit just because it happened. You don't deny it, but you can't just leave it there with a halfass "oh, that's too bad...but it's staying" either. Well, you can, but why would you? Why not play something more quintessentially, non-niche-dependent American?

if by "listen to" you start with the premise being able to stay awake and interested, I find it to be the other way around. But that's just me. That's what I was thinking too, actually. I pretty much agree with everything he says in that interview, especially about always being open to new stimuli. But he talks like an artist and plays like a craftsman. At some point, if you're going to be your own harshest critic about what comes out of you, that should extend to giving interviews as well.

I remember when Kate Smith was alive. She always creeped me out then but then she died and kinda went away. Then 9/11 happened and POOF! there she was again, another trauma to the American soul attempting to be soothed by nostalgia at any cost. And now she's gone from at least one place. Good riddance, imo. Plenty of other songs, plenty of other singers. May have? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq0HH9d_lHk

Oh, Phillip Glass is fucking everywhere today, if not him directly, then all that bullshit that came off of him. No, Phillip Glass is not having hit records, but his musical ideas are in movies, commercials, tv, every fucking where. I understand that they also experimented with Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong at one point!

David Lynch had a good run, and any number of prior "avant-gardisms" in all the arts have eventually permeated mass consciousness. The fact that Branford's making records in 2018 that sound like 1978 shows that evolution happens anyway. Resistance is futile. Best you can do is buy time to catch up. Worst you can do is create a false narrative and an alternative history to excuse your own laggardness.

Why did this man hate jazz so much?

I'll give Branford full credit for developing his craft.

Hey, it's almost like 1978!

Ok, then, if that's what he was writing for that band, I suggest that this might also be one? "All Of Me"

Has anybody gone back and looked at what Gil wrote for this gig? All I can find is that, yes, he had the gig, and yes, he wrote some charts/ But unlike his work with Thornhill, nobody seems to know what they were. I got this Hindsight LP that mentions Gil in passing as somebody who did some of the arrangements.I hear a few that sound as if they could possibly be Gil charts, but nothing as immediately identifiable as the Thornhill work. So...does anybody know anythng specific about this part of Gil's output? Ok, this is interesting, at least it indicates that somebody knows something! http://www.artistshare.com/media/audioplayer/?artistID=12&langID=1&mediaID=939&isHomeRadio=0&infoType=1

The difference between Branford and Kenny Garrett is that Branford never sounded like Sonny Stitt's dirty drawers.

I wish Bradford and Winten had been a recurring bit on Key & Peele, replete with their musics. That shit writes itself.