robertoart

I really do think that Amiri Baraka has significantly more to offer to "the conversation" than does some oil-field racist. Baraka has a starting point, and then some more places to go from it, none of which really end up in a call to Kill All The (pick your poison). The oil-field racists had that as only their staring point, mid-point, and final destination. Most of them, anyway. We're right to call bullshit on Baraka's anti-Semetic rhetoric, but we're wrong to do that and then just walk away without listening for/to the follow-up. This is a man who is far from being always right, but he's far from being always wrong either. At least in my mind. Of course, if we don't want to have a/the conversation, or if we don't want to have THAT conversation, if we just want to hold hands and weep at our collective failed humanity, then yeah, fuck him. But if not him, then it will be somebody else at other some time. It always is. And they're not always as multi-tiered as Amiri Baraka. Your fist fights, you conquered hate that way, eh? Or did you just shut up a loudmouth? Granted, that would be a triumph in and of itself, but it's a helluva loud world. Selective hearing is a survival skill, and actions do speak louder than words. I'll listen for actions, not so much to words, and proceed accordingly. Your mileage will vary, no doubt. Besides, my fists will almost always be overpowered (especially back home, where people still lift heavy loads and such all day every day). My brain, not nearly so much. Gotta play from strength, and, especially, live to fight another day with the best weapons I have. Which are most assuredly not my fists. More to the point, by the time I entered the real world, any able-bodied adult who would talk to like directly to somebody's face in a "general situation" would quite likely have a handful of hurt coming directly from the recipient. This is in no small part to people like Amiri Baraka and other "hateful" people. Like it or hate it, "militant rhetoric" does empower people, and being able to take down your own foe instead of having to look to somebody else to do it for you is not in and of itself a bad thing. And people who lift heavy loads and such all day every day recognize other people who lift heavy loads and such all day every day, if you know what I mean. I get the all-black Vans. Wear them for office work, to gigs with a tux, and for play. Versatility, comfort, and damn good support. Them skateboarders got a good thing going with these things. I'm on my third pair, and have no intentions to look elsewhere for a substitute. DAMN fine footwear. What brand of footwear you choose or don't choose to buy might make you feel good about how you contribute or don't to exploitative work conditions overseas, but it has no effect on those conditions for the workers. Only structural change at the point of manufacture will do that. I think this is what Payton is getting at with the name change.

So Baraka is fingering the Jewish Power Structure as the biggest impediment to self determination? Yeah, sure. Because it's "the" instead of "a" and it's "the biggest" or nothing at all Thanks for playing!. Believe me, at one time that particular sexual ideology was a very dominant one among African-American males I knew, It was one of those "under the carpet" (no pun intended, I swear) things that didn't get discussed until guards were let all the way down. And this was in the sexually "liberated" mid-70s! Those who admitted to it were subject to much heat from their peers, believe me. Millie Jackson spent a large portion on one cut of her live album addressing the issue, essentially asserting that it was time for that nonsense (the enthusiastic rejection of cunnilingus) to end! Then there's the (mostly Southern, I believe) folkloric belief that putting menstrual blood in a man's food is a way to keep him hooked. That's some old, old hoodoo shit right there. So you're already cunillinguating with a menstruating woman. Being fat and Jewish is just icing on that particular Freak Cake! And...I can see readers recoiling in horror as we go down this road... Yeah, but again for Jones, in the context of this poem and the experiences it speaks of, the girlfriend on whom he performs cunnilingus being "fat and Jewish" seems to be a bit more than icing on the cake. For one thing, it seems to matter to Postell, whose opinion certainly matters to Jones. For another, assuming that by "fat" Jones means that she was not conventionally all that attractive, it's a way of saying that her being Jewish somehow was a point in her favor with Jones at the time -- a sign of how far, from his latter-day "enlightened" perspective, he had been into demeaning his own identity. As he says: "I strode with them, played with them, thought myself/ one with them, and jews were talking through/ my mouth." I can see that. I can also see the whole thing from the perspective of where he's been relative to where he's going instead of the other way around, if indeed there is such a thing. After a while, I get off the horse, because that really is the only way to get off the merry-go-round. Sometimes I think you need footnotes. I really don't see any possible way that Black America will become The New Nazis. Ever. Not even with a secretly-Muslim black president! Until that comes to the table as an even remotely viable possibility, I say let's keep it in the ballpark as to how to react to it. There will always be hateful & hurtful language used to express feelings of frustrations and resentments. Sometimes it will be calculated rhetoric, sometimes frenzied rant, sometimes a cry of pain, and sometimes some dumbass talking some ignorant idiocy. Bringing out the Silencers to censure the language does nothing to further the dialogue about why this would be happening, and denies the opportunity to distinguish between disingenuous manipulation, misdirection of legitimate frustration, out and out vile gutter-hate, and, oh by the way, possible self-examination as to why these motherfuckers be so damn ANGRY all the time. I don't care who you are, no matter where you go, there's going to be somebody who'd rather you not be there (I was adopted at the age of 4 days, so I guess that notion has been with me pretty much all my life at some level), and reflexively shutting them up (or trying to) won't change anything. Nor will "circling the wagons" with your "tribe" especially when your "tribe" contains about as many people with whom you'd just as soon keep away from as not (another less I learned from being adopted). The only true freedom is Inner Freedom, and like I suggested earlier (and as a result was told to get fucked...gee, that doesn't exactly dispel the paranoia about there being Silencers in the shadows, does it?) the path to Inner Freedom might not always be peaceful or quiet. Easy to do when the personal is political.

So Baraka is fingering the Jewish Power Structure as the biggest impediment to self determination?

No, what I am trying to say is that not being famiiar with Baraka much more than liner notes and as a name associated with the music I love, this thread prompted me to explore him further. Albeit from the distance of google books and other online interviews and critiques etc. I was as confronted as anyone would be by the spotlighting of Jewish people as a target of his writing. I immediately tried to argue away the distaste I felt, because I didn't want someone who I would otherwise regard as a courageous figure, to be stained in mind in this way. I haven't been able to reconcile that. Others I have read during my searches, appear to be reconciling it by saying that Baraka is using deliberately incendiary language that I assume they are suggesting is a mode of African American creative and cultural resistance. I would have to go back through my search engine to find the actual references.

Of course if there is any ambiguity that has people debating and arguing about whether someone is anti semitic, as opposed to exercising critical thought/expression with regard to Zionism, then its a flawed expression anyway. No matter what the artists true heart. Can it merely be argued for, as Black vernacular writing, as many critical supporters seem to be doing?

What do you mean by this?

Stanley Crouch on Baraka and the poem, from the Bad Plus website interview. EI: You've changed you mind on things over the years, and sometimes it has been confusing. There were things I didn't understand about your development until reading "Jazz Me Blues." For example, I knew of your dislike for Leroi Jones/ Amiri Baraka. However, your aggressive dismissal of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka always struck me as a something like as if I were to aggressively dismiss Paul Bley--my true forebear! Jones was a big influence on you. SC: Yes, he was, and I go into that in the book. EI: Exactly, and then you explain step by step how that relationship soured. It was quite revelatory. SC: Well, I think he lost his mind when he became super-black nationalist, anti-white, and so forth. He has really been a detrimental influence, so much so that if you make any criticism of something done by white people for what are apparently white reasons, most white people seem to they think you must be taking the Leroi Jones line. There's a lot of resentment--or hand-me-down resentment--in both races about that period of black nationalism. EI: Well, as a flabby white intellectual liberal, I will always be willing to give an angry black man a hearing. And while I really learned some things reading your personal history with Baraka, nothing you or anybody could say would change my mind that Black Music is one of the most significant books on jazz ever written. SC: Well, it is. EI: Those interviews with Wayne Shorter and Roy Haynes are great. And when he talks about Albert Ayler--I know you aren't that interested in Albert now, but you were at one point--when he talks about Albert Ayler he really hits high gear. I like what Gerald Early (who I wouldn't know about unless you hadn't written about him) said in Tuxedo Junction: Baraka…has done more than any other writer to popularize black avant-garde music…he certainly adored it. And adoration is a very useful kind of currency in a society of cash and carry emotions. There may have been negative consequences from some of the later essays in Black Music, but that feeling I got as a teenager reading Jones about a trio concert of Don Cherry, Wilbur Ware, and Billy Higgins--- SC: Whew! EI: --That feeling is immortal. SC: This was a very talented man. And when he went first into Black nationalism, then Super-Black racism, then Marxism--he shredded his talent in front of all of us. The overall problem with his writing in the last third of Black Music is that he never arrives at anything of substance to say about anyone he likes. You get no idea of HOW Albert Ayler or Sonny Murray played, just a lot of celebratory adjectives or phrases intended as barbs to exclude white readers. EI: And recently, his poem about Israel being behind 9/11-- SC: He's lost his mind. He's a nut now. He was a superb and original writer up until about 1965 or '66, maybe '67. When I was a younger guy, I would read his essays in Black Music over and over, and became intrigued with many of people he talked about. In fact, the essay in Considering Genius about Thelonious Monk, "At the Five Spot," is in direct response to the essay "Recent Monk" in Black Music. I was determined to outdo him, since he has HIS foot so firmly on the gas in that one. Wow! I thought the highest performance level (that I had seen) of "writing an essay about Thelonious Monk" had been achieved by Leroi Jones. He made you feel like you were at the club.

Jarman tick Wagner tick Gibson ? shirley you can't be serious. Is this one of Mel's 'projects" written and directed.

What I have found interesting about a cursory explore of Baraka on the internet, is that despite the desultory view of Cornel West, that 'jazz' is now just a fetish thing for old white men and rich kids, reading Baraka makes you feel like 'it aint necessarily so'

The people responsible for selecting which sessions got the 45rpm treatment, stated on the Hoffman forums, that they didn't think Patton's Blue Note Lp's were of significant quality and interest for their target audience. They did release Along Came John, but didn't have good words for that either. Said that Grant Green's guitar was out of tune, and he sounded drunk on the master tapes. So the usual arguments. Derivative of Jimmy Smith etc... They do appear to like Larry Young though.

Morris Levy was a 'bad' man. No irony intended

Davy Jones sure didn't get any uglier as he got older. RIP

Bernard Purdie

I don't believe the 'aesthetics' of Jazz can ever be separated from its 'cultural politics'. Not at this time. Maybe in the future. Also are these views best understood as racialist as opposed to 'culturalist'.

The Benson track that came to mind is called "The Hereafter" from Larry Young's "Heaven On Earth", recorded only a few months before "Miles In The Sky". Benson definitely sounds more "out" on this than usual. Still, it is a later 60's era recording, as were the other examples I mentioned. I was trying to think of your question in regard to players emerging at the time from an American context, as Szabo and Zoller both learned their music in Eastern Europe (and Mclaughlin in Britain). I know Joe Diorio is mentioned in an interview by Wes Montgomery, so he must have had the ear of musicians by the late sixties or earlier perhaps.

Interesting topic. John Patton's late sixties Lp's with Jimmy Ponder and James Blood Ulmer. Also Calvin Keys. George Benson on one of Larry Young's Blue Note sessions.

That didn't last either.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. Big thumbs up for the Wilson brothers. Little River Band in no way compares. They are involved in some similar issues about naming rights or something. Badly communicated irony. Hope you get better soon too chewy!

If only the Little River Band could now settle their differences, we could have an historic double bill.

Oh dear, Coltranes at centre half forward where do we play Mobley

Holiday equates to vacation.

Well some of his wrong guesses were more interesting than the right ones. And anyway what was that BB King thing Feather played him. On paper it looks like some kind of recording of BB impersonating a field caller.

As soon as I saw these articles getting posted I was hoping this blindfold test would pop up. Having known of its existence but never finding a copy. So thanks heaps jsangry. Actually I don't think Grant comes off as myopic as I thought he might, given the realities identified above, ie his experiential learning and so called immersion in Donaldson's 'taking care of business' perspective. That he was aware of the Coryell-Burton band was surprising to me actually. although I have no idea of the kind of profile they might have had at that time. Coryell though has documented many times the influence of Grant. There is a really great bit in his recent autobiography that recollects seeing Green-Young and Candy Finch at a place called Wells' Bar.

Interesting that Lou mentions in the liner notes to Say It Loud that he would have played with the Benson, Smith, Muhammad band for nothing. Doesn't sound like the recollections of someone that wasn't totally into the music he was making at this time.

Interesting