Face of the Bass

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.

I'm just amazed that somebody could claim to be working on a biography for this many decades and then produce something that, with the exception of the included interviews, could have been written in a couple months. It's not necessarily that it's bad, it's that a definitive biography of Parker should not spend much space regurgitating things like Birth of a Nation or Jack Johnson.

Yeah, as I kept reading this my opinion kept going down. It kind of feels like an essay that's been excessively padded, and his writing on American culture is really quite inane after awhile. It's a big disappointment.

So far there's nothing full of shit or wrong about it. It's actually kind of standard and predictable. For instance he spends a few pages talking about Birth of a Nation even though it came out before Parker was born. I think he was trying to make a point about blackface in American culture, but it kind of fell flat and was an unnecessary diversion.

He talked about this in his interview with Ratliff and it's the part that I found interesting. he said he wanted to put Bird more in the context of his time to make him more of a "real" person to the readers. Anyway, I am going to read it. Yeah, but the challenge in doing that is to connect all that stuff to Parker's world. And at times it feels like he's just trying to fill up space and doesn't have a clear reason to go into his digressions.

I'm almost 100 pages in. My main criticism so far is that Crouch spends a lot of time on broader American cultural history, which is interesting in its own right but seems to have only the most tenuous connection to Parker. I'm starting to think that this didn't need to be two volumes. But overall it's a good book. The interviews he does with Parker's family and associates are fantastic.

I think it's weird the way people are always giving Blue Train a hard time.

After reading the first chapter last night, I'll be very surprised if it turns out that Crouch has simply used Parker's life as a platform for advancing his own agendas. I haven't seen that so far.

My field is African history, and this is a field that has had to construct knowledge about the continent's past often without the kinds of evidence that historians of Europe or the United States are accustomed to using. Even once you take into account the written documents (usually written by somebody with a preconceived idea about what Africans were like), oral traditions (usually passed down in such a way so as to bolster the reputations of certain rulers), and archeology and linguistics, you still are left with massive gaps. For me, I see these gaps not as an obstacle but as an opportunity, because I think it allows for a different and more honest kind of writing, an empathetic writing whereby you are trying to enter the world of your subject in order to understand their perspective. It is an art. Narrative itself is an art. The Western world for the most part has tried to divide everything into binaries, to say that either you are basing your writing on "facts" OR you are basing it on "imagination" or "embellishment." This presupposes that the "facts" of a person's life don't themselves contain imagination or embellishment, and it presupposes that these kinds of writing are entirely different or opposed to one another. What I'm trying to say here is that the division between "fiction" and "non-fiction" is not as clear as people make it seem. There is much in common between fiction and non-fiction writing because both make use of "facts" and "imagination" and both seek to construct narratives that will engage their audiences. The lie that history as an academic discipline (a discipline I am a part of) tries to tell is that you should write history in such a way that another historian could come after you, retrace your steps, and reach the same conclusions. This is a lie because it pretends that history is a science, which it most certainly is not. It pretends that the historian is just this invisible messenger of a discrete body of "facts" that he has discovered and wishes to share with the world. It ignores the fact that these "facts" are themselves subjective representations of reality that were created by some person somewhere. I don't know if I'm getting my meaning across. But what I want to say is that I know something of Stanley Crouch's worldview, know something of his writing, and know something of the work he has done researching Parker's life. Knowing these things, I now want to read his version of Parker's story. I'm not searching for the "definitive" account of his life because such a thing can never exist.

Well, I read the first chapter last night and thought it was great. I've never been a fan of anything Crouch has done in the past, but when somebody spends this long working on a subject, I pay attention. Also, I hate the comments on here about how people seem to be looking for a "sober" or "objective" perspective on Parker that sticks to "the facts." As a historian who cares about writing, I find all of this offensive. Good writing is good writing, and bad writing is bad writing.

You don't know it's crap.

Picked up a copy of it today. Looking forward to reading it. I definitely get what he means about needing a novelist's approach to fill in the gaps. Writing the biography of a man is an art, not a science.

Name one good one? But they all suck!

Of course the issue is not that the charge is out of proportion to the material being offered. But hell, they could include nuggets of gold in the box set and be justified in charging a much higher price. The problem is that this is a case of the "go big or go home" model run amok. It's basically a fuck you to anybody who is interested in this stuff but doesn't have the money or appetite for THIS large a set. I'd also question whether the category "blacks in Europe" is the right one, or whether clearer distinctions should be made between African Americans and Africans. But I'm sorely tempted all the same. Maybe I'll just sell a dozen box sets to try to dig up enough money to get this.

I mean, why not break it up into smaller box sets?

Man this looks like it will be a great set. I've got a keen and growing personal and professional interest in this sort of thing, but that price tag is an enormous obstacle. It makes me wish they had edited themselves more, and maybe limit it to 20 discs and 1 huge book instead of two. As it is the only way I could afford it would be to sell off half of my Mosaic box sets.

Honestly, I think it would be the Mingus box released last year. I have others that I love but to me that's the most essential one they've ever done.