Face of the Bass

It's not that I think culture is entirely irrelevant, but that I consider it distant secondary information to the sonic criteria I have for musical enjoyment. Culture is certainly relevant biographical information, but when do I reference that while listening? For example, I'm listening to John Coltrane "Out Of This World" from Coltrane (Impulse) right now. I love what the percussion and piano are doing right from the jump, then I hear Coltrane come in and as usual I love his sound. Coltrane's sound takes me back to some of the first jazz I ever loved (a few of the first jazz albums I bought were Giant Steps and Africa/Brass). McCoy Tyner's solo kicks in, and I'm amazed by both his hands. I can keep alternating back and forth between each soloist and Elvin Jones' tireless drumming... Where/when does the culture figure in? I know the cultural origins and the history (and enjoy learning about it), but ultimately when I'm listening the music stands on its own and is speaking to me in musical terms. For another food analogy, when I eat sushi, I'm psyched on the texture and taste of the raw piece of yellowtail tuna on my tongue. It's wonderful to experience, and I take my time chewing it in order to appreciate it. During that enjoyment, it's not likely that I would be sure to filter that enjoyment through some pronounced mental appreciation of Japanese culture in my inner monologue. I might, but it isn't necessary. It's more likely that I'd just enjoying eating while watching sports on the TVs above the bar. That's fine if that works for you. My point was simply that when I listen to music, I always want to know the background, the history, and to think about the "broader" implications of the music. Maybe it's because I'm a historian and I've just been trained over the years to deconstruct everything. I don't know what else to say other than that for me I tend to appreciate music more when I can grasp the cultural, social, economic, or political perspective from which it is coming. For this reason I suspect that I would really, really suck at blindfold tests, and that's why in fact I have no interest in them as such. Great post. Well said, Tom.

i wouldn't necessarily say that. but i would say this thread has now become officially boring and is already well into the category of jazz music forum threads that devolve into meaningless pontificating on what usually turn out to be one (or all) of the following: is marketing/money necessary to make art? is jazz black music? can white people play jazz? does wynton suck ass (and why/how)? how do you define swing (and could bill evans swing)? can/should you be able to separate an artist's personal behavior from his music/art? can pop music elements be used in jazz forms/musics? and if so, is jazz a higher artform than blah blah blah... all of these "topics of discussion" are sooooooooooooooooo played. for me personally, they're boring before they've begun. been there, done that. it's like going back to high school. vomit. Payton seems to be quite an adolescent asshole. maybe he'll grow up soon. he's also an excellent trumpet player. afaic, that's all there is here. Yes, it's much better to restrict discussion topics to the numbering system deployed by Mosaic for their limited edition box sets. That's always more enlightening and entertaining. Seriously, instead of divebombing into a thread and crapping all over the discussion, why don't people who are not interested in what is being discussed simply stop reading it?

I thought Noj's comments about culture being irrelevant to music were the most interesting in this entire thread. I think I disagree with the assertion but it raised many questions for me. Increasingly I have searched for music that is more stridently political in nature, but the political that I have in mind is basically inherent in any form of artistic expression. Anyway, when Noj made the remark about culture's irrelevancy to music itself, I thought about, say, the tradition of Mbira playing among the Shona peoples of Zimbabwe, and all the spiritual significance of the Mbira in precolonial times particularly. In fact, I think that in some ways the idea of appreciating any kind of art for its own sake is a sort of Western construction, maybe a product of the Enlightenment, that has sought to create clear and distinct boundaries between the secular and the sacred, and that has tried to elevate Reason to the highest of virtues. This is one of the things about many precolonial African musical traditions that I've always found intriguing...that such neat divisions are not even possible in cosmological systems that do not make clear distinctions between church and state, or between work and entertainment. I guess this is a way of saying that I think I am the exact opposite of Noj. When I listen to a piece of music, I want to know the soil from which it sprung. I find all the intersections between class, race, gender, generation, etc. that one finds in any form of cultural expression infinitely rewarding. But maybe that's just me.

Sorry, white people are never cool. It's one of Newton's laws.

The samples sound like something I'm definitely not interested in, and I'm very sympathetic to many of Payton's initial comments. I won't judge further without hearing the whole album (which I don't plan on getting). I would say however that I am now very nervous about the fact that my (colonialist) father is going to be getting tickets to a Payton concert for Christmas. Not from me, but from my mother, who came to me with a list of shows in their area, asking for advice. Payton was the biggest "name" on the list so I suggested she go that route, but I highly doubt my father or my mother will appreciate music along the lines of "Bitches," if that's what he's playing in concert these days. Oh well. Hopefully he will accept the humbling role of Uncle Tom, jazz musician, for at least a couple more months before courageously venturing into the post-colonial, post-modern world he has constructed for himself.

What's sad to me is the irrelevance of Nicholas Payton when compared to his supposed mastery of Black American Music. Also, I'd be curious to know what percentage of Payton's audience is white...he accuses Pelt of being an Uncle Tom, happy to stay on the plantation, but then where's the evidence that Payton ever left that plantation himself? Because he doesn't use the word "jazz." Oooohh...that's so revolutionary. I also like the irony of how he basically accuses Pelt of being a tool for whites by stoking black-on-black disagreement, but actually he's the one taking the argument to a whole other, much more personal, level. If Payton were to apply his own logic to himself, he would find that he himself is the very thing he is accusing everyone else of being.

Okay, I take back all the stuff I said before. Payton is simply a jackass.

Oddly enough, Coltrane's Village Vanguard box. I got it for Christmas one year and played it nonstop. Ever since I've always associated the music with winter and the holidays.

Up...price reduction on the Lee/Christy Mosaic and the Cardew biography, and also implementing a sale: buy three CDs, get a fourth free. (Fourth CD of equal or lesser value)... Thanks for looking.

I agree with this. I found the italicization of so many words so irritating that it actually caused me to put down the book. Really unnecessary intervention on the part of the author.

Well...I took a look at Marcus Strickland's public facebook post that seems to have been the match that set off the latest round. On the one hand, if THAT is really what Payton is reacting to, his reaction seems pretty over the top. Strickland is pretty straightforwardly talking past Payton, and unless I'm missing some context here is not being at all insulting. On the other hand, as someone who basically started a fight between Bill Summers and Jason Marsalis about issues related to this, I think it would be wrong to ignore the New Orleans context that Payton is operating under here. If you hold the views Payton does, it must be enormously challenging to be a resident of Marsalisland in New Orleans and have to put up with a scene that imposes these kinds of definitions on everything for popular consumption, while not known for being particularly friendly to dissenting ideas on these kinds of meta-issues. I agree with what you say here. I think people are taking his words too much as a "representation of truth" when what it really is is a kind of artistic manifesto, attempting to stake out some piece of unclaimed land. The discourses that surround jazz most certainly are dead, even if the music is not, which is why over the years we've seen so many attempts by musicians to redefine the music away from this term that they feel imprisons them.

But isn't this playing precisely into the most reductionist parody of what jazz is supposed to be? Wearing shades and suits and hats is the jazz uniform of a vanished age, when many jazz players were romantics who were trying to recapture the aesthetic of Charlie Parker and company, right down to the debilitating heroin addictions. If you think about what the craze for heroin did to the music in the 1950s and 1960s, you could make a reasonable argument that this ideal of what jazz should be is precisely what killed (in the most literal sense possible) the music. I've often thought that the reason jazz "died" in the 1960s or whenever you want to put it is because THE MUSICIANS died. Think of all the groundbreaking, incredible musicians who came of age in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, who never lived to see their fiftieth birthday. Though not all of these early deaths can be attributed to heroin(Clifford Brown being one obvious example of a tragic death that had nothing to do with drug use) the dependency on a dangerous drug decimated the jazz ranks during these critical years. I don't think the music has ever fully recovered from that, simply because the ranks of its finest musicians were so heavily depopulated during those years. Also, Miles not only blasted Dolphy, he blasted Cecil Taylor as well, and in his autobiography he makes clear (in more polite terms) that the music Coltrane made prior to his death could not match what he had done earlier (with Miles). Is there any major figure from the avant garde besides Coltrane that Miles ever had any kind words for? Maybe he thought highly of Ornette, not sure.

The Miles quote that everyone always likes to parrot is where he talks about how Armstrong played everything on his trumpet, that nobody has played anything that Louis didn't play first. I think that's probably bullshit. Did Louis Armstrong ever play trumpet the way Bill Dixon did? Not to my knowledge. Again, I think the reaction to this poem is way over the top. People are responding to what Payton wrote way, way, way too literally...the statement should be read as one of artistic freedom, a kind of manifesto. There is a long tradition of writers, painters and musicians making statements like these. Didactic quibbling over dates and terminology is not, in my opinion, a meaningful response to the essence of what Payton is saying. But it seems that I'm the only one on this board who enjoyed this piece and who now thinks more of Payton having read it.

Do you have Ornette Coleman's Beauty is a Rare Thing? To me that would be one place to start.

There are many wonderful albums on ECM, but the problem is that, when it comes to jazz, the label now seems to have an almost factory mentality whereby every release is in the same general area, with the same brooding dark covers, with the same smoothed out sound. The music strikes my ears as being far too deep into the tepid waters of Baby Boomer New Age narcissism. And I can't help but notice that some artists who record for the label (Marilyn Crispell comes immediately to mind) did their best, edgiest work before falling into the ECM stable and disappearing into the musical equivalent of a scented candle shop.

Yes! I had forgotten about this one, but it is excellent stuff.

I love how whenever a writer tries to use words and concepts that are beyond a high schooler's level of comprehension, he immediately gets attacked for being a poseur, or pretentious, or arrogant. And I also love how any "jazz" musician who refuses to genuflect before the jazz canon gets labeled as unappreciative and ignorant. All these attacks serve to do is to confirm the message of Payton's poem. Miles was the opposite of Payton--always respectful towards Armstrong and Ellington, and dismissive of everyone other than himself who was trying to push the music in a new direction--Dolphy, Taylor, late Coltrane, etc. Jazz artists, writers, and collectors have spent far too much of their time celebrating the dead and ignoring the present. It's the reason why even a quality jazz board like this one spends most of its time talking about whatever coffin that mausoleum of a record company, Mosaic, decides to release next. Do we have every single alternate take that some master who has been dead for half a century ever made? People talk more about this than they do about anything new, and I imagine most people on this board would have a very difficult time naming very many musicians younger than 40. But suggest that a genre that most often makes news when yet another one of its acclaimed masters dies might be a dead end, and you get tarred and feathered. In my opinion, any original musician who wants to break through this suffocating discourse and actually have her work celebrated as art should run away from the "jazz" label like it is the plague. For all but a select few who get rewarded with grants and teaching gigs, it is a sure route to poverty and obscurity. And most musicians who do decide to stay within the "jazz tradition" today end up turning their work into the musical equivalent of a Civil War battle reenactment, i.e., a shadow of the real article. The difference between jazz musicians of half a century ago and jazz musicians today is that the former were the ideal models of Gramsci's "organic intellectuals," the latter more often than not academically trained professionals who are trying to recapture days of glory that never existed in the first place.

Didn't even know about this one. (This was actually my entire (selfish) motive for starting this thread, hoping that someone would reference something I'd never heard of.) I just got into Soviet jazz through the Leo Records sale, and have been really turned onto the music.

I actually really liked this blog post, and I've never heard Nicholas Payton's music. I don't think each of the individual sentences in the piece are meant to be taken quite as literally as people here seem to be doing. And I certainly think that it is bullshit to try to judge an album or the intentions of its creator based on a simplistic interpretation of a single word (Bitch). Sometimes I think that the problem with the world today is that people no longer think in poetic terms, but are rather always intent on putting absolutely everything that they encounter into some box with a label affixed to it. But that's not appreciating something, that's just killing it, which is I think what Payton is trying to say. (And says very well, in my opinion.) Also loved how he dropped in "colonialist mentality." Echoes of Fanon and Biko.

I've got most of the Cecil FMPs on individual disc, but unfortunately didn't come to the music until the box set had long been out of print. Just scanning around for it today, I see that the lowest price at the moment appears to be $600. Insane.

Two things I love are avant garde jazz and the box set. Avant garde jazz is the closest thing I've ever found in this world to the kind of beauty I can understand and connect to, while the format of the box set feeds my desire for a sense of narrative in the music I listen to. While this is not an exhaustive list, here are some of my favorite box sets covering avant garde jazz....I'd be curious to hear what others like most. For my list I'm focusing mostly on post-Coltrane/Ornette/Ayler free jazz... 1. Jimmy Lyons - The Box Set (Ayler Records) --Love the first couple discs especially on this one. 2. Anthony Braxton - Complete Arista Recordings (Mosaic) -- This set seemed to be an urban legend for several years and when it finally appeared it more than lived up to all the hype. 3. Bill Dixon - Odyssey (Self Released) -- This might be a more idiosyncratic choice...but I love solo trumpet music and no one was better at making it than Dixon. 4. 1967/68: The Art Ensemble (Nessa)-- It has been too long since I last listened to this one, but it is a wonderful document of a critical time period in the development of the Chicago school of free jazz... 5. Cecil Taylor -- Two Ts For A Lovely T (Condanza) --been too long since I heard this one too... What say you?

Somebody once said that the Beatles were dying in their order of coolness, but if that were the case Harrison would have been shot instead of Lennon, and Paul McCartney could expect to live to be 112 years old.

Update, with many new listings, including some box sets and a book as well.

But this seems entirely generational. The majority of Millennials do not care about physical artifacts and actually prefer not to have those bulky CDs laying around, so I do think the end is in sight, even if it doesn't come in 2012. But you know -- 2012 It's starting to make sense... I don't know if it's entirely generational. I'm 34 and pretty much hate MP3s, except when I'm traveling and want my music with me. But when I'm at home, the physical object matters. The fact that I have yet to see a convincing model of the MP3 whereby you can hear the music and have all the liner notes, personnel listing, etc. with the music has been the biggest disappointment. Everybody keeps acting like music is better than it's ever been from the perspective of a listener, and I think that's only the case if you don't care about sound quality and don't care about having basic information of the recording when you listen to music. If you do care about those things, then MP3s are a tremendous loss when compared to the CD era.

I think these predictions are premature. Yes, the major labels are clearly moving away from CDs, but I suspect small labels will be releasing CDs well past 2012. We are human beings, and the physical artifact will always retain some importance. At least I hope so.