umum_cypher

What's that got to do with the price of fish?

Pick-up groups playing pick-up music. (By and large: "Sidewinder every set"). That's how I understood it. The situation changed after 1968 though. Something in the book - clears throat - about this sort of thing. Tom

Hadn't heard about Malachi Thompson. He was a lovely bloke with a lot to say. And a pleasingly raw way of saying it.

Email from the PR ... DONALD BYRD HAS CANCELLED HIS SHOWS DUE TO UNFORSEEN CIRCUMSTANCES THIS TUESDAY 2nd , WEDNESDAY 3rd & THURSDAY 4th . THE REPLACEMENT WILL BE ROY AYERS UBIQUITY + support from DJ PERRY LOUIS ( JAZZ COTECH ). TICKETS WILL BE PRICED AT £17.50ADV / £20 DOOR I was going to see him in Philadelphia a couple of years ago, but he cancelled then too.

Tbn is without a doubt Curtis - same staccato 12/8 swing feel, several of his favourite licks. Tpt makes more mistakes than Booker usually did (i.e. some), and the doubletime bit doesn't start very Bookerishly, but that chorus has got his fingerprints all over it: his articulation, line architecture, wholetone substitutions ... 95% sure. Following a second listen, 99.4% sure. He just doesn't sound like anyone else - vice versa, really.

Oh Bertrand! More prognostication?! :-) (gave up on the icon after two minutes of trying, it's not important) Not to be too coy, but maybe that info did reach me (and check the acknowledgements page when you get a copy). It's true I didn't have much to do with the Veteran Lee Morgan Research Corps - they were at home, I don't know, maybe preparing for publication - but I was visible enough. In fact, that kind of mechanism (who ow[n]ed what / paid for which / why and how it affected Lee's art) is central to the thing; I draw some conclusions about Lee's (rather fishy, it has to be said) legal arrangements, and while they might not be final, and they might not prove to be 100% accurate, they at least some conclusions. I know that's not how these books usually work, but I did say… Hope you like it, anyway. No more, promise. (Recent threads show that writer-talks-to-board-about-own-work doesn't make for palatable reading.) ta Tom [edited in failed attempt to sort out sodding icons]

I know it’s strictly non-U to register in order to talk up your own book, and I’m loath to break an eighteen-month lurking run anyway, but I agree that this isn’t just hair-splitting. Three things, from the trivial to the less-trivial: 1. Lee Morgan’s Native American features (from his mum’s side) meant that he didn’t need a process. It was all pomade. 2. I don’t for a second think he was ‘conflicted by his racial identity’. (Mind you, I think the idea that black people with straightened hair demonstrate that kind of conflictedness is itself a bit of a canard). 3. I don’t suggest that he had a process or was conflicted in that way in the book. What the above review begins to suggest and what some posters above then conclude is a slightly different matter. The word ‘process’ is indeed attributed to an interviewee, not me. OK, that interviewee, talking at 30 years distance, isn’t entirely accurate in remembering Lee Morgan’s hairdressing habits – and I’ve already by that time in the book given the accurate information – but she’s still making a valid point. This correspondent wasn’t the only person to remark upon the apparent datedness of Lee’s hair and its political-symbolic ramifications, so I put it in, inconsistencies aside. People did and do think that about Lee’s hair. What Lee (sorry, Morgan) thought about it - and his isn't the only important point of view, surely - we don’t know. We don’t need to waste time guessing, either; like many here I can’t abide psychoanalysis by historical remove, not to mention academic theorising built on wafer thin bits of evidence. Again, the culture-identity interpretation is drawn from the reviewer (‘…when Afros were de rigueur…’), not me. I don’t think there’s much reprehensible about that interpretation, and the book presents it via that interviewee, but it’s not quite my own view. (In fact, I’ve got something rather different to say about Lee’s haircut symbolism). It would be glib to suggest that my whole project is ideologically skewed on the basis of these others’ words. Thanks to ValerieB for pointing this out. The review above concentrates on the late ‘political’ stuff, much of which is pretty familiar to posters here I imagine. Discussion of music and life, which account for two thirds of the subtitle (and which another reviewer has talked about more) are played down, even though they are actually featured in the book much more extensively than the ‘politics’. There’s a reason for that, though: that review was part of an ‘American Books Special’, which, coming the weekend after the elections over there, had a bit of a political bent. So that angle may well have been requested by the editor. Two layers of hearsay, an added interpretation, and more than likely some extra-creative, commercial constraints: sounds like the jazz world to me. And that’s the kind of history I’ve written. Bertrand, like you I’ve read a lot of ‘scholarly’ writing on jazz, so I completely understand that you feel forlorn about the prospect of more. But this isn’t that kind of work. I’d much prefer to hear your glum reactions than your glum prognostications. Thanks in advance for indulging this. Sorry it’s so prolix. I don’t want to defend the book, as it can stand up for itself, but until it’s out and people are reading it (rather than other people’s glosses on it) I’m keen that it’s not taken for some kind of Cult-Studs/Kofsky bastard child. Tom