Rabshakeh

Wolf Eyes & Anthony Braxton – Live At Pioneer Works, 26 October 2023 Their first collaboration was obviously a big fun piece of news but this is really far more substantial as music.

Thanks, and will do. Looks great.

Mihály Dresch Quartet / Archie Shepp – Hungarian Bebop Ocho - Ocho David Murray Black Saint Quartet Featuring Cassandra Wilson – Sacred Ground Matthew Shipp Trio – The Conduct Of Jazz Car journey to Walthamstow and back for a children's birthday party.

Thanks. I always find it weird how Mosaic doesn't just tell you which records are represented in the sets.

David Murray - Sacred Ground

II Quattro Di Lucca – Quartetto

I've decided to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest finally. For whatever reason the book seems to have replaced Ulysses as the book that an intelligent person is supposed to have read, and it now seems to be the go-to indicator for young people who came of age with social media to determine whether someone is a serious reader. I have enjoyed other internet era touchstones like 2666 and I am a shallow person so I decided it is time that I had to read it. My initial impression 100 pages in is surprise at how terrible it is. It seems begging on its knees desperate to be Pynchon, but Wallace is just a terrible writer sentence-by-sentence (some of the sentances are eye-raisingly bad without ever being funny), the tone is leaden and tiresome, and the only thing interesting about the ideas and setting is that Wallace considered them interesting. The purpose of the footnotes seems to be to give academics something in the book's form to discuss. But mostly it is that cringing humiliating derivative relationship to Pynchon (similar to e.g. Neal Stephenson ripping off William Gibson's classics) is really distracting for me. I can only assume that it is famous because it is long; has encyclopedic pretentions (well, foot notes); because the main character fits the internet archetype of the gifted kid dropout; and because the people reading it confuse an inability to write with complexity. It feels.at this stage like it is going to be a long 981 pages, so if I am missing anything let me know. I'm always willing to be correct. Perhaps the book is plot driven or picks up as it goes. Macdonald can have a lot of plotting issues (the opposite of Agatha Christie's: everyone just confesses immediately upon being confirmed and in sequential order), but when his books are good they are very good and among my favourites of their type.

Joking aside, I wonder whether the new (not actually new) combative approach taken by Shipp and Lowe etc on social media might help raise the profile and energy level of the music? My AI marketing phrase generator tells me that viral social media dunks on establishment power structures are Big! Right! Now!. If it does help put a spotlight on this kind of music, that would be great. As my father (a retailer) used to say, goods never sold from a stockroom (not in fact true for the era of Amazon and Ikea, as my father himself was sadly to learn, but the concept still holds). You do have to merchandise yourself.

Salvatore Bonafede – For The Time Being A nice record that is actually the sum of its parts that I hadn't listened to before. Enjoying it during a rare lie in after a truly horrific work week.

For years this was the only post 1970 jazz record that I owned. I know every note.

Are those from the Emanem recordings?

Yeah. That Mulligan is another one that's straight on the nose. I see what you mean about Jo Jones in the Jumpin' clip.

Did Jo Jones do that too? I'm wretched and can't think of anything.

Yes! The Nordine is a perfect example. Maybe even at the time it was more of a "jazz culture" thing, rather than a "jazz" thing?

When a character in a film or TV show goes into a jazz club, you know it is a jazz club because there is a drummer in shades playing ti tu tu ti tu tu ti on his hi hats. That hi hat pattern is immediately recognisable as a symbol that jazz is occuring. Can anyone think of actual examples of this drum pattern in the jazz of the 1940s to 1960s. Maybe I'm just tired and struggling to think of it whilst listening to Andrew Cyrille.