umum_cypher

That statement suggests to me that his primary goal in writing about music is not necessarily to provide an in depth analysis of the music. Does the above perspective impact any of the thoughts expressed so far? It depends what you mean by 'an in-depth analysis of the music', doesn't it. The quote suggests to me (not unexpectedly) that it won't be a biog in the style of 'track 3 has an excoriating trumpet solo by X, followed in Y's piano solo by an amusing quotation of I Dream of Jeannie' - thank God - or else in the style of 'in bar 32, Z's characteristic altered dominant substitution is not anticipated in A's accompaniment, which resorts again to the b9 chord' ... but neither of those, the first style especially, necessarily result in in-depth analysis. In-depth description, maybe.

That's true, but I think it's changing. I know someone writing on precisely this Whiteman question right now; other academics (cough) are doing work trying to deal with these things as complex encounters between different and sometimes not fully compatible musical expectations, experiences, ideologies, competencies etc. - i.e., looking at musical life as thickly and problematically lived rather than (just) as a token of historical ignorance, condemned from a pretend contemporary enlightenment. (Well, I can see I've already got my academic on this morning ... time to start work.)

Yes, Cherry was on copyright for that session.

Er, thanks for the recommendations, I've seen it done correctly though ... (and if Beneath the Underdog is devoid of posturing, I'm a dutchman; besides, autobiography is not interchangeable with biography - if anything, it's biography's opposite). You're undoubtedly right about that argument of Tucker's, but you can't take that single passage as standing for 'academic' jazz studies.

Hey, leave her out of it ... I am always keen to defend studies that are heavy on the context - if it's well researched - for two reasons: 1) often, it's the context we know less about - whereas a lot of writing that makes an effort to stick solely on 'the music' ends up being redundant in one way or another, offering endless adjectival or technical approximations of an aural experience which we've already had and which was infinitely richer, or else listing albums, tracks and events in a way that patronizes a clued-up audience like jazz's; 2) insisting that a music - any music - always be considered entirely separately from its social/historical contexts both impoverishes our understanding of how and why it came into being - which is not simply to say that social factor X produces music Y - and allows it to become elevated (reified, since we're doing Adorno) into a safely aestheticized object rather than human process, partially stripped of the humanity that shaped it, dispatched down the road to Starbucks soundtrack ... of course if you go too far you end up with the mirror image of that, where the 'context' itself becomes the reified object. But I don't think that's a reason to dismiss the method tout court. There are plenty of ways to skin a cat, so to speak, and there's no need for every book on every jazz hero to look the same, or be written by the same kinds of people. There are no 'correct' qualifications.

I agree that it reads to me like a complaint against intentional fallacy. And I don't disagree with many of your points about the NJS. But that kind of intentionally fallacious thinking - 'clearly in this piece he wanted to convey the pain of closing his mother' - is a cornerstone of trad jazz studies (not necessarily to the exclusion of the new stuff, granted!) ... examples later ...

Yes, but that's a charge more properly levelled at the trad (i.e. non-'New') jazz scholarship that you laud above to the exclusion of more socio-cultural angled work!

It's surely a Philly connection from the mid-50s. Hank was well-liked for his informal teaching of young sax players there.

Babyboomers with a hippy past buy into ruthless supercapitalism as soon as the opportunity presents itself? Well I never.

The weirdness will only be comprehensible to British members I imagine, but Evan Parker on an album by Vic Reeves is hard to beat.

'America on Hold' ... ah, the pathos. The deathless No. 14, despite its hints of Horace Silver c. 1965-7, is basically a royalty-busting re-write of 'Tune Up'. But for me this version captures the sensation of being on the phone much better.

That quote might sum up the entire debate. Clearly Shorter is a brilliant musician who has written beautiful, moving music. It is contrasted against a train of traditional thought which produced a whole lot of successful art, wherein players are asked to fit the mold, and Wayne chooses to not fit the mold for the convenience of achieving his greatest potential as an artist. Essentially, we have a situation where there are two interpretations of what is right and wrong and both are correct. That's art for you. Lou is right to Lou. I'm right to me. You're right to you. Opinions are like assholes, but no one should act like one. Being an asshole about it is the only place Lou goes wrong--but he's entitled to his opinion and like it or not he helps to validate the dissenting opinions. Usually I'd be with you, but in this case I think that's unnecessarily relativist. Wayne Shorter could (and did) play the shit out of changes. To the extent that anything in music can be objectively shown, this can.

What a truly wonderful cover!

Don't remember him not being on it - I think I have it here somewhere, maybe I'll dig it out and have a listen later.

I think what Ubu (and myself) are curious about is what specific Mobley record did you come across the other week and realize with slight regret that you had enough? Hey, it was my overflow, not yours!

Well, the overflow can't be objective of course. And it's not a list of particular records - it's a sense of a personal limit having been reached, the returns having diminished too far. I'm not talking about a run-of-the-mill kind of listening here, the kind where you check out an artist and like them somewhat, but think you've got as much out of them as you're going to after a couple of albums, or like you describe, buying up a lot of records because you know there's good stuff on them all, even if they're not consistent - that kind of casual relationship to an artist's music I probably wouldn't think about in these terms, or at all. I'm talking about the limits of a relationship to music that has been deeply important to you. I'm a searcher too, but searches run their course. Now, if an unlogged Mobley album was dug up and released tomorrow, I'd be ordering it immediately. But dealing with finite bodies of work as we are, for me eventually having the music in your life in a 'new' or fresh way doesn't mean having ever more different (and almost always lesser) recordings, but having again and again, every day, the old stuff in your head and/or other parts of your body because it's so fully internalised. The fact that my internal MP3 player is at this moment running its hundred thousandth playing of The Breakthrough, and in some way animating me as it always does even though I'm not actually hearing it, it is much more of a testament to Mobley in my life now than, say, dutifully listening for the first time to a relatively underwhelming concert bootleg. Of course I want to hear the new stuff, but I may not hunt it down now as much as the old stuff keeps hunting me down. So even if there's overflow, it doesn't mean the cup is not ... well, you see the metaphor.

Ah, but those aren't part of the overflow. Yeah. Doesn't Woody Allen say somewhere that he envies people who haven't heard Potato Head Blues because it means they can still hear Potato Head Blues for the first time?

I never thought I could have enough Mobley. But then I came by something new the other week and, to my great surprise (and slight regret), I realised I already had enough. The rest is overflow.

It's horrible. Herb Alpert-style parping.

Wasn't that in Graz? IIRC the band had arrived late after an arduous but well lubricated trans-Alpine trek.

Until the trumpet chorus it's better with the sound off: Chet's pullover is the pullover of a great artist. Michel Graillier has also got the west coast look down brilliantly.

Au contraire

Conlon Nancarrow played by Herbert Henck. I'm going to buy this now, the response the participating labels are looking for. But I'm with some of the posts above - this can't be a viable business model in the medium term, either for Spotify or (more to the point) the record companies. Their advertising sales haven't taken off yet, most being for Spotify itself or charities ... but one advert nearly makes me turn it off - 'Hi', it says, 'at Spotify we believe music should be free'. Why? This is the recent misconception that record companies are trying to battle. Maybe, if labels provide their catalogue but end up strengthening that perception, the can't-beat-em-join-em strategy isn't the right one.

Good old Louis Edit: bad link fixed