Face of the Bass

This needs its own page. Amiri Baraka has passed away at the age of 79. http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2014/01/hold_hold_hold_amiri_baraka_former_nj_poet_laureate_and_prolific_author_dead_at_79.html I am filled with sadness at the moment. He has been a major inspiration to me.

Yeah, I would wait to get the full box. I have had it for a long time and while I don't think it's essential, much of the material is really good, and I wouldn't want to be without the sideman sessions.

Yeah, the Mosaic set, either LP or CD. If one can't track that down, what are the best alternatives to get these recordings?

Hello all, I'm looking for a copy of this set, either for sale or trade. If you have one and might be interested in working out a deal, please send me a PM. Thanks!

Update...for the Little Walter I will consider other offers (either cash or trade). So if you have an interest in this item but $180 is too much, send me a PM and we'll see if we can work something out.

Up with one addition. I have the Little Walter set for sale on Hip-o-select. The lowest used price I could find on the internet was about $35 higher than what I'm offering it for. There is some moderate shelf wear to the outer box but the discs and booklet are in excellent condition.

The only thing this world needs is for somebody to come along and do legit reissues of the Fontana New Jazz Series and the Horo label. Everything else fades into insignificance.

If that sentence really presented the whole history of jazz, then I'd have zero interest in listening to the music.

I was wondering if anyone could give me some feedback on the Muhal Richard Abrams set. Worth the price of admission? I'm looking to get into something new in this catalog. I'm already familiar with the material on the Braxton, Lacy, Haden, Dixon, Taylor, Hemphill, and Threadgill sets, and I think somebody is getting me the Lake and Cyrille sets for Christmas.

Be very interested to hear your thoughts when you get around to reading it. I assigned it in my US History course this past semester.

Again, I'd really encourage people to read Family Properties, which deals directly with this stuff. You know, actual research, as opposed to people just pulling stuff out of their asses. http://www.amazon.com/Family-Properties-Struggle-Transformed-Chicago/dp/0805091424

There is a good book on the real estate markets in Chicago in the mid-twentieth century that deals with the relationships between Jews and African-Americans in a way that is nuanced and more helpful than that implied by most broader classifications. It is called Family Properties, and is written by Beryl Satter. One thing to understand about the relationships between Jews and blacks in the U.S. is that many urban neighborhoods that became black in the mid twentieth century were, prior to that, often Jewish and/or containing other white immigrant communities. So there is a kind of hierarchy at work, or rather perhaps a continuum, that occasionally put Jews and blacks into close contact with one another, and in relationships that were often antagonistic and economically exploitative (as happened in the buying and selling of real estate). I think one of the things Satter suggests is that the only partial integration of Jews into the mainstream of American life during the twentieth century often meant that upwardly mobile Jewish people played unsavory economic roles that encouraged anti-Semitism among blacks.

Berry set is gone.

I have for sale both the Chuck Berry Johnny B. Goode box set on Hip-o-select, and the Atlantic R&B Box Set. Both sets are in like new condition, prices include shipping to the US. Paypal only, please inquire for international deliveries. Chuck Berry: His Complete 50's Chess Recoridngs -- $70 Atlantic R&B, 1947-1974 -- $50 Thanks for looking!

I think his music was a bit more political than that, not in an overly-reductive way, but it's there. I think free jazz is the most vibrant sub-genre of jazz that ever existed. The free jazz movement is now 50 years old, basically half the life of all of recorded jazz. While much of it fizzled in the 1970s, I think Leeway is right that it reemerged in other contexts, and can still be heard in the American context in the music of, for instance, William Parker. Without the post-Ornette musical legacy, jazz would be pretty boring, IMO. Economically perhaps it hurt the music, but in terms of extending the vitality of the genre, I think it played a very important role in keeping jazz culturally relevant after the emergence of rock and roll.

Oh, he does give plenty of love to Coltrane. He says at one point that Coltrane was basically finishing off the song form in jazz, and that Coleman and others like him were picking up where Trane was ending.

I've been reading Baraka/Jones's Black Music this week and I think in those essays, mainly from the early 1960s, his critique of hard bop comes through rather clearly. He compares it to the swing music of the 1930s, in that the hard bop movement represents a mainstreaming of its more revolutionary predecessor (in the case of swing, that would be the music of the 1920s; obviously in the case of hard bop, that's the bebop revolution). He argues that this mainstreaming, with regard to hard bop, leads to a formulaic smoothing of the music's jagged edges. In the early 1960s he was arguing that the just-emerging free jazz of people like Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry and so forth was in a sense a rejection of hard bop and a return to the revolutionary rhythmic potential of bebop. FWIW, there's a lot about his analysis that I agree with. One thing I find interesting, reading his stuff from the early 1960s, was his sense that Sonny Rollins was going to be central to the development of free jazz. Certainly there are elements there in the music, but I think that Rollins's subsequent recorded output probably would have been regarded by Jones as something of a letdown. Reading these essays has reminded me that, for my money, he's one of the best jazz critics ever and a great essayist. I've never been able to enjoy the poetry as much as I do his prose, but I'll give it another try at some point.

One of the reasons I got into academia was to improve the writing. There are absolutely ways to write about complex cultural phenomena with language that can be understood and appreciated by the educated layperson. I often think that the off-putting formulations of some academics are simply a function of not understanding how to write well. Also, to the point earlier that this academic discourse insults jazz, I would add that it insults just about everything that it tries to cover. Seeing the lives of ordinary people reduced in this way is actually even more offensive than what some writers try to do with Trane. I started reading the edited volume on Black America's Quest for Freedom and gave up on it partway through. My recollection is that there were a few nice essays but also a lot of stuff that was really third-rate.

Oh man, I'm all over this. I love this period of McPhee's career.

Bump, with further price reductions on the Farlow and on the Ellington.

I have the following sets for sale. Prices include shipping to the U.S. Paypal only. Inquire for international deliveries. As near as I can tell, these prices are all better than what you will find elsewhere online. 1. Don Cherry: Codona Trilogy (Like New Condition, ECM) $23 2. Dexter Gordon Complete Prestige Recordings (Booklet and discs in like new condition. Outer box has minor shelf wear.) $90 3. Sonny Stitt: Stitt's Bits The Bebop Recordings, 1949-1952 (Discs and booklet in like new condition. Minor shelf wear to outer box.) $13 4. Henry Threadgill: Complete Black Saint/Soul Note (like new) $23

Bump with a price reduction on the Farlow set. Thanks for looking!

Yeah, the problem is that those ruminations on culture are not that special or insightful. Seriously, I know a lot about American cultural history and the sections on, say, D.W. Griffith and Birth of a Nation were pretty par for the course.

I have the following Mosaic Sets for sale. Prices include shipping to the U.S. Please inquire about international deliveries. Paypal only, please pm if interested. Woody Shaw -- The Complete Muse Sessions. Discs 6 and 7 are still sealed. $100 Tal Farlow -- The Complete Verve Tal Farlow Sessions. This is the Universal Mosaic Box Set. $120 Box, booklet, discs and inserts on both these sets are all in like new condition. Thanks for looking!

Not sure if this is the best forum for this request, but I'm looking for a reasonably-priced copy of the OOP set on Hip-o-select, Little Walter: The Complete Chess Masters. If you have a copy that you are willing to part with, I can offer many things in trade. Please pm if interested.