Guy Berger

SGCIM, thank you. Your insight into this music is truly witty, insightful and innovative. I cannot wait to read more of your commentary on all subjects, musical and nonmusical.

I picked up Meant to Be and Time on My Hands a few years ago - my first JS discs except for a few sideman appearances - and they're outstanding. (Though I believe Allen Lowe's comments about the terrible sound that many contemporary jazz guitarists have applies in spades.) Highly recommended.

Loved this.

Thanks to Ethan for gathering those "eulogies".

Discuss: THE MAN & THE JOURNEY was Pink Floyd's best concept album.

My favorite work with him seems to be from around this period, late 60s through mid 70s. Columbia and ECM in particular did an exceptional job of recording him.

Another strong point, but one where we might diverge slightly. It wasn't until Echoes that I thought they competently established a sense of mood. Pretty much all of the extended workouts before that seemed to meander to their detriment. I'm willing to review and reconsider, but the live stuff on Umma Gumma, for example, just seemed like a band lost in the wilderness desperately searching for a way out. I don't think the live album on Ummagumma is necessarily the band playing at its best; listen to the Fillmore West concert from April 1970 or one of The Man & The Journey concerts, this was definitely not "a band lost in the wilderness desperately searching for a way out." But after 1973 the concerts gradually became more scripted, predictable affairs. And by the time you got to Animals, the magic was rapidly draining from the studio work too.

this was our music

Yeah but by then, the first derivative was negative. Huh? They'd peaked and were getting worse.

Yeah but by then, the first derivative was negative.

Whatever Pink Floyd I end up listening to in the next few decades is likely to be dominated by concert recordings from their peak as a live act (1969-73).

The Final Cut is a good album, though not unflawed. (I mean, "Not Now John"... yikes.) Less played-to-death than The Wall, and less of the glitzy bombast. On the other hand, The Pros & Cons of Hitchhiking is one of the absolute worst albums I have ever heard - be glad you avoided it. I never had any interest in investigating any of RW's other solo work after subjecting myself to it.

The difference between Syd's departure and the current PF is the continuity. THAT was an actively gigging band, this is basically a defunct project that is resurrected at a low frequency - basically, a description of music recorded under the PF name post-1977. That said, the "is it really Pink Floyd" debate is probably among the least interesting metaphysical debates ever; moreover the two Gilmour-led albums have much more stylistic similarity to the classic Floyd sound than The Wall and The Final Cut did.

New Pink Floyd album coming out in October? Doesn't seem like a hoax unless those two Twitter accounts were hacked. Is David Gilmour in financial trouble? Not sure I really care at this point - though The Division Bell was pretty good, the kind of solid album talented middle-aged British rockers would make.

I'm pretty excited about this!

Another funny factoid.. my first encounter with Tolkienworld was this translation.

Yes, very. Thanks for sharing David.

Love his music, in particular that from his mid-to-late-50s heyday (though I like the 60s stuff too). RIP Horace, you made us all very happy.

Interesting. I always thought that Germany had a more 'open' attitude to jazz (was always amazed at the amount of challenging jazz and not just Kenny G/Boney James etc. being broadcast on FM back in the 1980s at a time in the UK when it was once or twice a week) but I guess that things must have deteriorated. Shame.. oops,sorry, just noticed making an error in my previous post:it should read "wasn't given any serious grief" (now amended). Anyway, I wasn't referring to Germany in particular; rather what I think is a global phenomenon of increased pressure to adhere to accepted brands/trends. BTW: Jazz broadcasting and live jazz IMO went downhill sharply in Germany since the '80s I'm pretty skeptical that in the US there is "increased pressure to adhere to accepted brands/trends". Most likely, it's the same as it always was.

I think you are arguing at cross-purposes here, SD. MG's point is that (A) listening to artist A and then artist B, and calling it "progress" is a flawed normative judgment and that (B) it's not necessarily guided by some sort of grand deterministic process. I'm not familiar with Germany, but I'm pretty skeptical that this is the case in the United States.

Definitely. I said in my post that there were fewer jazz albums on the charts in the 90s (though still quite a good number. But yes, the number has been coming down since 1979 (which I think was the peak year since 1955 - though the charts have more records on them now ) It occurred to me the other day that, back in the fifties and sixties, there were loads of pop instrumentals on the singles charts - not just by jazz musicians like Bill Doggett, Johnny Dankworth (!), Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff - but by pure pop or R&B musicians like Duane Eddy, the Ventures, Johnny & the Hurricanes, The Mar-Keys, Booker T & the MGs, the Shadows, Sandy Nelson, Bent Fabric, the Surfaris, the Tornadoes and a host of others. I don't know whether instrumental pop singles still make the charts but I very much doubt it and it seems to me that the decline of the pop instrumental has actually got something to do with the decline in young people's interest in jazz. If people don't hear instrumental music (good, bad and indifferent) as a regular and natural part of their cultural diet, jazz isn't going to mean much. MG This is part of what I was getting at too (and you touch upon in a later post in the thread). The "stylistic gap" between jazz and popular music began to widen at some point after 1940, but early on it wasn't that wide. So fans of one style could find things that were familiar in another. Over time it got so wide that "fan crossover" became much more rare, though it still happens from time to time.

You're definitely wrong there, Guy. Lots of jazz albums got onto the Billboard pop or R&B charts in the eighties. I've got a list of 388 by 131 artists... MG Interesting list, which suggests my claim was somewhat hyperbolic. But if you were to construct similar lists for other decades, my suspicion is there has been a decrease post-1980 (and I would guess the 1990s and 2000s totals are even lower than the 1980s you compiled. Jazz these days is much less relevant to popular culture than it was 50 years ago.

Indeed!

1) Audiences at NYC clubs are generally not that old - I see lots of people in their 20s and 30s. 2) It's not surprising to me that audiences in concert halls are older, and I would guess if you live in a place where concert halls are the main jazz venue, the apparent jazz audience would be relatively old. 3) The youngest jazz audiences I've seen are at things like Medeski Martin & Wood concerts. If you want young audiences, you need to come to where young people view live music, not to stuffy concert halls. 4) Were audiences for jazz ever THAT young, especially after WW2? I mean, how old were the working class African Americans who listened to soul jazz and hard bop in the 50s and 60s? Or the middle-class whites that listened to west coast jazz during that period? 5) Like someone else said, the main identifying characteristic of audiences in NYC clubs seems to be "disposable income". 6) Related to all these points, one of the big changes in jazz (particularly straight ahead) since 197x is the complete disconnect from popular music. I would even say that a lot of discussion by current fans of pre-197x straight ahead jazz tends to retroactively divorce it from popular music of that time.

Sad.