robertoart

Grohl played drums behind McCartney's second number on SNL this evening and was not fucking around with it. Grohl's intensity meant I had high hopes for the song for the first ten seconds or so. By the end I realised it was only Grohl's drumming that sustained my interest. Although this was the live performance from the 12/12/12 concert.

So, McCartney's Liberace to you? , He's Macca to his friends. I wonder if Ayler was still alive, would McCartney have asked him to play on his Jazz album. and would Ayler have acquiesced. Ayler and Dianna Kral, thats a bit more cognitive dissonance for you. Good old McCartney...always trying to push his avant-garde credentials/pretensions.

Can you expand this to maybe three words at least.

This is so much bullshit. If your talking about great, good and less good players, maybe you have a point. But that is to also sidestep the facts of the creation, sustenance and development of the musical language as a whole. It can't be reduced to an argument about 'this speaker was a better speaker than this other speaker'. To deny the social and intellectual context of their (musicians) times, is a fake out for people who want to push some regrettable agendas. Unfortunately the history of Jazz can provide a lot of enticing social and creative worlds for some Academics to attach their Historical projections into, but it doesn't deny the even more regrettable need to fight against misplaced revisionism. As for Schildkraut how much of an influence was he on Coltrane. A GREAT BIG ONE or a somewhat less tangential one. I suppose we can also say Slominsky's scalular phone book was a big influence too.

Yeh, Warne Marsh. So how many White Tenor players in the times this panel took place can be compared to the 'multitudes' of Black Tenor giants then. Obviously I'm talking about multitudes in terms of critical mass not derivation. Marsh and Tristano etc.al were an anomaly compared to the all cultural expression of Jazz as a Black music language. And Marsh, Tristano, Pepper, Bix, Trumbauer, Pee Wee Russell, W. Breuker, J. Adasiewicz, etc. etc. express Jazz as their own musical languages. Xlento!, as Hank Mobley might say. Nobody is denying that jazz was originally, and remains in terms of expressive, etc., aspects, a basically African-American tradition. They don't express Jazz as their 'own musical languages', they express the musical language of Jazz with their own voices or accents, the language is the key thing, the voice or accent the individual thing. It's also more than 'in terms of expressive etc., aspects'...it is down to notes, scales-diminished, melodic minor.. harmonic substituitions etc. From where did this musical thinking and structures emerge? From dominant musical thinkers from Black bands and communities. As far as Free Jazz, there was no Free Jazz in Europe before Ornette, Coltrane and Ayler. Derek Bailey or no.

If "they" "reject" (or at least don't rush to embrace) "us", why...how can that be? Do they not see how worthy we are? Do they think that they are better than us? Everything gets viewed through the lens of "me/us" being the center of everybody's universe. The assumption is that it is true for me, therefore it is true for all. The notion that one can be basically different without surrendering full/essential equality of legitimacy is still a difficult one to grasp in a lot of places, and not just in the area of race. I suspect Marsailis is retreating back onto the fence the further this clip goes. He makes the point about European audiences, re-Coltrane and Brecker, but he surely was also meaning any audience faced with the reality of Coltrane's social cry as opposed to Brecker's tenorisms. And don't forget there are still people claiming Brecker was critically neglected because he was White (believe it or not). Re Euro-pean-ess/Whiteness and 'something they can do'. The meaning is probably closer to 'something they can participate in and influence on their own terms'. Anywhere in the Western World (including America) this hardly seems an issue now. When was the last truly all-Black intersubjective Jazz movement? - the Loft scene/Harmolodic Seventies, and the New Lions Marsailis early Eighties. although I suppose some will be glad to say this was all falsely propped up by White Critics with an ideological agenda.The Loft scene became the Downtown scene - whose legacy has chiefly been to free Free Jazz from an essential African American Aesthetic into an Avant-Noise Improv one, where White musicians can now participate 'on their own terms'. Who are the sentinels/beneficiary's of this movement - Zorn/Douglas/Vanderwhatshisname/Ribot/Frisell etc.al.

Yeh, Warne Marsh. So how many White Tenor players in the times this panel took place can be compared to the 'multitudes' of Black Tenor giants then. Obviously I'm talking about multitudes in terms of critical mass not derivation. Marsh and Tristano etc.al were an anomaly compared to the all cultural expression of Jazz as a Black music language.

Well no actually. The point Marsailis is making re-Coltrane and Brecker is exactly as the point you make about Cecil in the first paragraph. Just trade White panelists circa 1964 for the Brecker audience. Marsailis is saying the feeling of the music as produced by the lived experience of Coltrane - and the band - can't be distilled down to an essence of skilled notes and sound. It was too confrontational for that, (and correspondingly more sublime).

Yes, so there is also sound and notes. But those sounds and notes are reflective of an intersubjective experience. What White tenor players in the late Fifties and Sixties had a sound to compare to the multitudes of great Black tenor players of the time? http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xyvdXUixo2o

Interesting how the debate of the times - and the one Cecil Taylor is fighting here - that Jazz was not a legitimate Canonical music - has now made way for another kind of debate. The one these days driven by embittered 'reverse racist' bemoaners.

Calabro: The idea that in Western culture we are concerned with developmental music... There is implied in this comment, that Western (notational) music is 'a part of history', while 'improvisation' is a lesser, in the moment 'expression', somehow outside of it. It seems inevitable that in the next sentence Calabro rehearses the accusations of 'the angry Black man'. Taylor then digs in, about 'George Washington', and his (Taylor's) Indigenous heritage, Taylor equating improvisation with 'oral history' and socialisation, as opposed to 'history' as written, or metaphorically 'notated'. Taylor: I agree with you. You don’t want to spend that time. You have that prerogative, you know, and also that license, but, unfortunately, me, you know, in my entirety, living in America, I don't have the same kind of licenses that you have so I have to know, like, as much as the history books allow…and they don’t allow me to know too much. Fortunately, there is a thing – folklore – so there are certain things I know about my historical predecessors, if you will, that is not written in history books. Like um gee – I can’t exactly say that my great great great great grandfather was George Washington…

Reading the Dean discog, I noticed a vocalist from the '50's by the name of Jewel Belle. I wonder if this could be the same vocalist Blood Ulmer mentions in his early interviews called Jewel 'Brenner'. Before his time with Hank Marr, Ulmer played for three years with Jewel Brenner And The Swing Kings. According to Ulmer, "This girl, Jewel Brenner, asked me to play in her band...She was very good and she had an act. She shaved all her hair off and had a wig on. She'd come up and sing four or five numbers and on the last song she'd take off her wig and that was her act. I think she was the first Black woman to shave all her hair off her head. And that amazed White men. So, she was more famous for that". http://www.cmoa.org/searchcollections/imageview.aspx?image=26542&irn=19246 Jewel Brenner wearing strapless lace dress and shaved head singing with five piece band, possibly including Gordon "Slick" Jackson on piano, Billy Stewart on guitar, J. C. Gordon on tenor saxophone and electric bass http://www.cmoa.org/searchcollections/details.aspx?item=19246

I enjoyed reading the opinion on Do The Math. http://dothemath.typepad.com/

How could you not be with Cecil? Overton: I want to get back to Lennie Tristano..........

Sounds like the David Murray Big Band.

"Gees it's repetitious isn't it"

If your anywhere near a place called Huntington Station, go and visit the comic book store there. Be sure to take a baseball bat and hit the guy on the head for me. I might not get the $89 dollars back he owes me (plus return postage), but I'll feel a lot better knowing he at least has a sore head. BTW never buy vinyl off a comic book seller, unless your sure they know what they're doing.

Here is the page on Tommy Dean, mentions the session with Grant Green (via Lord). Also quotes a letter from Virgil Matheus about the St Louis scene. It all tends to support what you are saying MG. http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/deanie.html

Simple answer. No. Less simple answer. He plays some lines amongst the general ensemble revivalist meeting rave-ups. One song is the same groove as a tune from the Stanley Turrentine Rough and Tumble session. If you are familiar with that, you will recognise it. The MLW album is up on Youtube if you want to hear it. Thanks, Bertrand.

To continue with MG's comments about the liner notes from the 'what music did you buy today thread'. I thought the liner notes were very interesting, but to follow up on MG's comment re-Tommy Dean, perhaps nobody involved in the production of the new cd was aware of the Tommy Dean connection. How well known would something like that be? I know very little about Sam Lazar and even less of Tommy Dean. I suspect this is the kind of deep knowledge, that only, if any, people outside the loop of the producers/liner notes specialists would know. This is the kind of thing I would find really interesting to learn about, as well as the social conditions surrounding the club and music scene of the time - which the notes do quite well at addressing. I do miss having new Bob Belden notes to read though. He was kinda writing his GG biography in installments via the ever expanding Grant Green discography Grant's guitar is also further back in the soundstage than I'm used to hearing. Whether this is a result of the recording - or Grant not having is amp up louder - I do not know.

Wow. This link seems to suggest your right. http://www.cyberboxi...ing/jtorres.htm It says Jose Torres won the Silver medal at the 56 Melbourne Olympics. He must have just been making Mailer look good for Regan's camera

In terms of 'pace' that is more Coltrane like, Pat Martino comes to mind. It remains consistent when he plays at faster or slower tempos. So perhaps 'one paced'. Though he tends to 'jab' at the tune on the slower tempo songs.

Two great wordsmiths and Norman Mailer Or should that be two great wordsmiths and Bob Dylan? Who is the other fighter getting crunched by Mailer?

He's hiring an Indian village to scallop the fretboards. (guitar geeks joke)

The Virgin Mary Mother Theresa? Doris Day