Adam

They got some without numbers. ← A small question. In "limited editions" of 2500 or whatever (such as Mosaic, and this), does that usually mean "2500 plus a few for band members and other special folks?" I owe you an email to order it and the Warne Marsh.

What numbers do the band members have?

I have a cassette copy of Gil Evans Live at Sweet Basil, I believe, in which they play a couple of the Hendrix tunes, but I don't know if there are any additional Hendrix titles from those listed above. Will check the title list later. OK, from All Music: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:cwv8b5m4bsqs Vol. 1 includes Voodoo Child, Up from the Skies Vol. 2 includes Stone Free. Also, Live at the Public Theatre, which I've never seen. According to AMG: "Two Gil Evans LPs originally recorded for the Japanese Trio label and put out in the United States on the now-defunct Black-Hawk company features the veteran arranger leading a 14-piece group at a pair of 1980 concerts." Volume 1 includes Up From the Skies Vol 2 includes Stone Free

I was actually going to pick the Blue Note Sonny Clark Trio, but a de facto thread on it came into being in Reissues: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...&hl=sonny+clark Like Guy, I'll ask that people please don't post in this thread until the current AOTW is finished -- I just want to give people a heads up so they can pick this up in time for November 20. So then I thought I should respond to my own email from long ago: "Hmmm, no Woody Herman or Dizzy Gillespie or Gil Evans or Rahsaan Roland Kirk yet." But at least we've had Gillespie, and almost one Kirk. So Gil Evans came to mind. At first I thought "Out of the Cool," for another classic album. And then I thought, nah, maybe try Steven Bernstein - Diaspora Blues, with the Same Rivers Trio. But then I decided on The Gil Evans Orchestra Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix There's a new "Bluebird First Editions" version. I've never successfully attached a photo, so if anyone feels like it, please do. tracks: 1. Angel 2. Crosstown Traffic 3. Medley: Castles Made of Sand/Foxey Lady 4. Up From the Skies 5. 1983 - A Merman I Should Turn To Be 6. Voodoo Chile 7. Gypsy Eyes 8. Little Wing Alternate Takes: 9. Angel 10. Castles Made of Sand 11. Up From the Skies 12. Gypsy Eyes recorded in New York, 1975, except Track 8, recorded in 1975. Gil Evans - leader, arranger, piano The Orchestra includes more than I feel like typing at the moment, but here's a cut and paste job from All Music Guide: His unique 19-piece unit, an orchestra that included two French horns, the tuba of Howard Johnson, three guitars, two basses, two percussionists and such soloists as altoist David Sanborn, trumpeter Marvin "Hannibal" Peterson, Billy Harper on tenor, and guitarists Ryo Kawasaki and John Abercrombie. I hope you all find it worthy of discussion.

Greetings all, I run Los Angeles Filmforum, www.lafilmforum.org We're in the middle of a series called The Most Typical Avant-Garde, described below. But I wanted to call the attention of Southern California members to a film that we are screening this Sunday November 13 at 7 pm. PASSING THROUGH by Larry Clark (not the photographer Clark but a filmmaker out of UCLA in the 1970s who now teaches in Northern California. Horace Tapscott is in the film, and the Pan African people's Arkestra does the music. the film is about a jazz musician. Here's the imdb link. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0198891/combined The Most Typical Avant-Garde: Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles Presented by David James Black & Chicano Film I Am Joaquin (Luis Valdez, 1969, 20 min.) Passing Through (Larry Clark, 1977, 105 min.) In the 1970s, film schools and other institutions ancillary to Hollywood interacted with the city's unique demographic and spatial structures to make Los Angeles the single most significant place where ethnic minorities were able to produce cinemas of their own. In ways that reflected their various cultural traditions, African-Americans, Asian Americans, and Chicanos all made populist challenges to the exploitative and repressive traditions of the capitalist cinema. In his new book, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) David E. James argues that, as well as being the center of the commercial film industry, Los Angeles has nourished a dazzling array of avant-garde, minor, and minority cinemas: Socialist cinemas in the early teens and 1930s; formal experimentations in the interstices or on the edges of the industry in the 1920s; amateur cinemas with many kinds of negotiation with the industry in the 1930s; personal cinemas of psychic self-investigation invented by Maya Deren in the 1940s and continued by Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington, and Stan Brakhage; the tradition of radiant abstract visual music that runs from Oskar Fischinger and John and James Whitney to contemporary digital works; the counterculture's utopian visions of the 1960s; and the attempts by African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanos, women, gays, and lesbians to create cinemas of their own in the 1970s and since. That these and other movements kept the city in the aesthetic and social vanguard in all periods of cinema obliges us to recognize that Los Angeles, rather than New York or San Francisco is the true center of avant-garde cinema in the United States, and hence the prototype of all twentieth century attempts to create emancipatory alternatives to capitalist culture. Los Angeles Filmforum joins with the UCLA Film and Television Archive to screen a selection of the works James discusses, emphasizing films that have recently been screened only rarely. This major seven program retrospective will give the audiences of Los Angeles an unparalleled opportunity to view the range of truly alternative film work that has been produced in the city over the last 85 years. David James in person, with copies of his book for sale.

Hey, it's out! They were waiting for you to ask.

I'll try to ask - will see how the interview goes and if I think asking for new releases/reissues will not be problematic in any kind... seems he's in a good mood, though, judging from his emails to us! Adam, is the above mail a new one? I didn't get it, and I think I deleted all earlier hat mailings... (which is why I couldn't quite the one I was paraphrasing above). ← Hi, I got it last week forwarded to me by my friend George Schmid. He produced The Dark Tree and is in regular contact with Werner. At a jazz listening + dinner session last week, he implied that Werner is at the point where if anyone just had the time to take over the Hat label, he would be open to passing it on. best regards, Adam

Dear Friend, The following CDs have been shipped to our distributors. Please contact your local distributor for promo copies. hatOLOGY 627 : Manuel Mengis Gruppe 6 · Into The Barn by Manuel Mengis-trumpet, Achim Escher-alto saxophone, Christoph Erb-tenor saxophone, Flo Stoffner-electric quitar, Marcel Stalder- electric bass and Linonel Friedli-drums (new release) Born in the Swiss canton Wallis in 1972, trumpeter and part-time mountain guide Mengis probably is virtually unknown to most people. It thus comes as a surprise that his first release is for a label that has not pledged itself to promote and encourage local young talents but to track down adventurous and ambitious music of our time. Which,however, is another sign that the world of jazz has been undergoing fundamental changes for the past couple of years. Whoever still believes that New York is the hub of the jazz world is on the wrong track. Unfortunately many influential CD producers, festival organisers and music critics are still barking up the wrong tree (even in Europe), thus it will take some time for innovative impulses from regions which so far have been regarded as the periphery to be duly recognised. Globalisation, which has often been demonised, could turn out to be a truly positive force in this respect. - Tom Gsteiger Que ce premier album - que la plupart considèrerait > comme une partition vide - d'un trompettiste né en 1972 dans le Valais > et ainsi guide de montagne à ses heures, paraisse sous un label dédié > non pas à la promotion de nouvelles générations locales, mais bien à la > découverte de musiques explosives, actuelles et exigeantes, est certes de > prime abord surprenant. Il faut toutefois y voir aussi l'indice (plus large) > que le monde du jazz se trouve depuis quelques années en pleine mutation > fondamentale. Ceux qui considèrent encore aujourd'hui New York comme > l'épicentre du monde de jazz, font fausse route. Ceux-là même comptant > malheureusement au grand nombre des producteurs de CDs, organisateurs de > festival et critiques influents (aussi en Europe), il s'écoulera encore du temps > jusqu'à ce que les impulsions innovatrices des régions perçues jusqu'ici comme > périphériques, soient connues comme il convient. La globalisation, souvent > diabolisée, pourrait s'avérer à cet égard une force principalement > positive. - Tom Gsteiger hatOLOGY 628 : David Liebman · The Distance Runner by David Liebman solo live Willisau Festival 2004 (new release) Here's Dave Liebman with his saxophones and a woodenflute in his very first concert of unaccompanied solos. It didn't happen until his fourth decade as a working jazz artist, even though he had recorded four solo albums down through theyears. Once again we hear his brilliant sound and technique, and there are his devotion to spontaneity combined with his high instinct to shape improvisations. What Liebman offers most of all is a personal quality of adventure, the result of his endless musical curiosity. This music has so much vitality. - John Litweiler Erst im vierten Jahrzehnt seiner Karriere als Jazzkünstler, die ihren musikalischen Niederschlag unter anderem auch in vier Soloalben gefunden hat, bestreitet Dave Liebman mit seinen Saxophonen und einer Holzflöte sein allererstes Solokonzert. Einmal mehr überzeugt er mit seinem brillanten Ton und seiner virtuosen Technik, mit einer bedingungslosen Hingabe an die Spontaneität des Spiels, verbunden mit einem untrüglichen Instinkt für den formalen Aufbau seiner Improvisationen. Was Liebman jedoch vor allem auszeichnet, ist eine ihm eigene Offenheit für das Unbekannte, die inseiner ungezähmten musikalischen Neugier gründet. Diese Musik strotzt vor Vitalität. - John Litweiler Best regards, Werner X. Uehlinger wxu.hathut.com@bluewin.ch HAT HUT RECORDS LTD. Box 521, 4020 Basel, Switzerland Phone +41.61.373.0773 Fax +41.61.373.0774 (on request only!) http://www.hathut.com The 30th Year Since 1975, an ear to the future Depuis 1975, une oreille vers le futur Seit 1975, ein Ohr in die Zukunft

And if you don't have the first edition, then???

I have one lonely Embryo with Mal Waldron CD, and had no idea there was so much more. Wow.

It's a shame that George W. Bush didn't remain the Texas Rangers team president. He'd have them in the Series by now!

DeJohnette has started his own label. From the LA Times yesterday: http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/c...?coll=cl-suncal Drumming up business his own way Starting a label gives Jack DeJohnette another outlet for his musically venturesome ways. By Don Heckman, Special to The Times "RENAISSANCE man" may be an overused term, but it's the first thought that comes to mind while talking with drummer Jack DeJohnette, a musician whose skills and interests stretch easily across the gamut of contemporary music. You may have seen him with Keith Jarrett and Gary Peacock, adding buoyant layers of percussive sound to their inventive cruises across the Great American Songbook. If you've listened to Miles Davis' classic "Bitches Brew," you've heard his drumming actively contributing to a set of performances that changed the face of contemporary jazz. Or you may have been fortunate enough to experience his transformative work with his own groups, Directions, New Directions and Special Edition. The ever-adventurous DeJohnette, 63, embarked on yet another creative journey earlier this year when he launched his own independent record company — named Golden Beams after a composition he wrote for his 1992 album "Earthwalk." Although he is following a path blazed by numerous jazz musicians, DeJohnette is characteristically doing so in his own fashion, with an initial release of three albums that might best be described as genre-resistant. The first was "Music in the Key of Om," a transcendent tapestry of meditative sound using resonating bell tones and a flowing, vocal-like melody produced on an acoustic-sounding synthesizer. It came about, says DeJohnette, because his wife, Lydia, wanted a tape that was grounded in relaxing sounds. "So I went into a meditative stage, went to my studio here at the house and made the CD, using these acoustic resonating bells," says the drummer by phone from his home near Woodstock, N.Y. "I played it for Lydia, she liked it, my family liked it, other people did and so we decided to put it out. Funny thing is it works for me too. When I'm on the road I put it on and fall asleep with it. It just puts me right out." The second release from Golden Beams, "Music From the Hearts of the Masters," takes a very different tack. An intimate set of spontaneous duets by DeJohnette and Gambia's Foday Musa Suso, who plays the lyre-like kora, it combines cruise-control jazz rhythms with hypnotic African melodies to create an irresistible momentum. "There are quite a few African kora players out there," says DeJohnette, "but Foday uses the instrument in a unique way, and he's not afraid to move it into more contemporary areas. We spent four days in the studio knocking grooves around, just drums and kora, and it came out pretty full, since Foday didn't hesitate to use electronic effects to fill things out. Funny thing is some of the reviews refer to him as a 'jazz kora' player — which was a very pleasant surprise to him." The just-released third album, "The Ripple Effect: Hybrids," takes DeJohnette's music into even more intriguing territory. Four of the tracks are enhanced and remixed versions of pieces from "Music From the Hearts of the Masters." Three feature eerie, atmospheric vocals from Brazilian singer Marlui Miranda, with multi-instrumentalist and frequent musical companion John Surman adding woodwind textures. Remixer Ben Surman (John's son and DeJohnette's son-in-law) pulls everything together in colorfully layered musical fashion. "We called the CD 'Hybrid' to reflect the balance of acoustic and electronic elements," says DeJohnette. "I like to think of it as being accessible while also being creative in the way that jazz improvisation is. The loops keep going on while different surprises grab your ear as the atmosphere keeps shifting — almost like cinematography." A creative overview THE sense of musical shifting is equally applicable to DeJohnette's future plans, both with and beyond his new record label. What he describes as his "Art of the Duo" series — which began with the Foday Musa Suso CD — will continue with recorded duets with Don Alias and Bill Frisell, and another "Music in the Key of Om" is already in the works. Asked if that's not an ambitious program for a small label, DeJohnette simply laughs. "Well, it's all my money, and we just try to get the most out of what we put into it," he says. "With the record business being what it is today, the idea of having my own creative control over the music that I put out feels like a pretty good idea." And one that's consistent with DeJohnette's creative overview, an all-embracing perspective that has been a driving force in his career. "I believe that jazz has always been a world music," he says. "But that's what music in general is. I've heard reggae in country music. There's a potpourri of the rich diversity of cultures that are available for musicians, if they take the time to listen to it. "Even given that perspective, though, it's ultimately up to the creativity and the ability of the artist to tell a convincing story. Somebody once said that written music is crystallized sound which slows down so that you have to read it. But the way it was created, the way all music is created, was spontaneously done, in the moment. And that's the place that I hope my music — no matter what style I'm working in — comes from."

There's a comic show coming up that is so big, it will take 2 museums to host it! From the Los Angeles Times http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmu...e-more-channels An uneasy accord L.A. museums open their walls to comics as true works of art. Is it long overdue, still an odd mix, or simply inviting cartoonists to a party they may not want to attend? By Scott Timberg, Times Staff Writer Last year, one of Canada's most prestigious museums approached the cartoonist Seth, whose work combines realistic, character-based storytelling with a muted, nostalgic visual style reminiscent of Edward Hopper, about a show of contemporary artists who use pop imagery. Seth's comics would be included as part of the "pop" category — an example of the kind of ore a fine artist could crush into diamonds. A big break for the cartoonist? "I pretty much immediately told him I didn't think this was a good idea," Seth recalls of his talk with the curator. "A lot of cartoonists, myself included, are pretty negative about that kind of art, work that treats comics as some kind of pop culture junk. I've always kind of hated that — using comics the same way you'd use soup can labels." The art world, since World War I, has invited all kinds of objects and imagery into gallery and museum spaces, from Marcel Duchamp's urinal to Andy Warhol's soup cans and Brillo boxes to Mike Kelley's stuffed animals. Over the last few years, comics have been among them, often transformed by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein or Philip Guston or ironically "appropriated" alongside advertising or handbills. A big, joint exhibition that arrives next month at Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum, "Masters of American Comics" is a step beyond the earlier shows that saw comics as a kind of raw material still awaiting transformation. It's hardly comics' maiden voyage into the art world, but it's the first major museum show to trace the history of the medium as an art form in itself. As such, it serves as a window onto the awkward — at times loving, at times strained, at times merely opportunistic — relationship between these two worlds. "I think it's been happening in fits and starts over the last 20 years or so," Scott McCloud, the author of the seminal "Understanding Comics," says of the growing connections between comics and the art world. What's new is the attitude toward comics: Until recently treated like cultural artifacts, they're increasingly regarded as the output of capital-A artists with worldviews, life stories, individual styles and a host of idiosyncrasies. "For years, if comics received recognition from cultural institutions or the academy, it was as an anonymous cultural phenomenon," McCloud says. "Authorless and raw, like an Alan Lomax field recording. The literary world would look at the Archie comics of the '50s as an indicator of the culture that gave birth to them, but you wouldn't pay attention to the person who wrote or drew it." The "Masters" show takes a different point of view. John Carlin, one of the exhibition's curators, says it's part of "Americans coming to grips with their own culture. American classical music is jazz, so why wouldn't American classical visual expression be comics? And if you're serious about that, then you'd have to establish a canon. Who are the masters?" Many cartoonists, and comics fans, feel pride for the recognition. Others are conflicted. Carlin spoke with cartoonist Art Spiegelman, whose Pulitzer Prize for "Maus" in 1992 helped earn the form mainstream respect and who helped inspire the show. "He said being in a museum," Carlin reports, "was like having a notary seal put on the pact he made with the devil." Growing among grown-ups Book reviews offer respectful coverage of new graphic novels; publishers sell hundreds of thousands of copies; awards committees consider them alongside Philip Roth. Filmmakers, in recent years, have tackled not only superhero comics but more realistic graphic novels, with David Cronenberg's grim "A History of Violence" being only the latest example. Between Michael Chabon's novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" (itself a Pulitzer winner), the film for Daniel Clowes' alienated "Ghost World," and Marjane Satrapi's Iranian-set "Persepolis" books, it's hard to imagine a culturally attuned American who's unaware of comics' growing adult audience. "The reason the mainstream culture hasn't resisted is that comics fans spend money," says Fred Van Lente, a curator and board member at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York's SoHo. "We've gone from growing up hiding comics when we were 16 or 17 so the other kids wouldn't find out, to seeing 'Spider-Man' and 'Spider-Man 2' explode at the box office." Add the fact that people who grew up viewing comics as a serious, collectible medium are moving into jobs with publishers, universities and museums. It seems inevitable, then, that even a slow-moving beast like the art world would take notice. Others point to the generation of Robert Crumb, who came of age in the '60s. "Those were the first cartoonists to see themselves consciously as artists, doing purely personal work, not making concessions to mainstream conventions," says Ivan Brunetti, a cartoonist who curated "The Cartoonist's Eye," a well-received recent group show at Columbia College Chicago's A+D Gallery. The shift from craftsman to artist among Crumb's generation, and those who emulated him, has made a rendezvous with fine arts a natural. At the same time, says curator Carlin, comics enthusiasts have rethought their history. "It's like the late '50s, when the French critics started to look at popular Hollywood filmmakers and saw authorship. So Hitchcock and John Ford, and others who were making entertainment and weren't art-film people, got this kind of glow. That's what happened to the George Herrimans and Chester Goulds of the world," he says, naming the creators of Krazy Kat and Dick Tracy. To others, the explanation is more straightforward. "Why are galleries and museums starting to notice comics?" asks McCloud. "I think, simply, the work's better. The best of them today are just better than the best in the '80s. Chris Ware," McCloud says, naming the author of the intricate "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth." "There's your answer: He just took comics to a different level." A 'lower-class' genre Those who think comics have been a rich and complex art form since Winsor McCay, whose "Little Nemo" drawings from a century ago bridged Art Nouveau and Surrealism, wonder why a show like "Masters" has taken so long to appear. Some answer that snobbery — class-based and otherwise — is to blame. "It was a lower-class art form," says Rod Gilchrist, director of San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum, who points out that comics were typically published in workingmen's newspapers. "The language was the language of the Irish immigrant, the German immigrant. And the stories were the concerns of everyday people," he says. Civic and religious groups talked papers into canceling strips, considered threats to young people. These days, he says, as comics have become what he calls "the soup du jour of academia," that kind of opposition seems anachronistic. "Once Warhol exhibited the Brillo boxes, the distinction between high and low was broken forever," Gilchrist says, adding that many people in contemporary art now have a working knowledge of comics. Still, he says, "When I took my job here in 1998, a lot of my art world friends said, 'What are you doing?' And my New York friends said, 'This will be the end of your career.' " Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer, admits that museums have been slow to acknowledge comic art. "Artists themselves have been much more open about recognizing it than institutions, perhaps because they have nothing to lose and can see the work for what it is." Some of the problems with a museum show have more to do with the material itself. Comics drawings are not created with a gallery space in mind: Even the curators of "Masters" concede that newspaper pages don't look quite at home on museum walls, in part because comics are a narrative as much as a visual medium. The show combines original drawings, most of them pen and ink, with mass-produced images from books and periodicals. "Early on, the museums had a lot of trouble with this exhibition," says Carlin, "because the majority of it is essentially worthless printed pages of newspaper." Carlin originally approached the Whitney Museum of American Art (where Chris Ware was later included in the Whitney Biennial) as a home for the show. "They said, 'We think this is interesting — we know there's something going on in this area — but we just don't think it would make a good exhibition. Prove to us that this will work on the walls of a museum.' And I think to some degree they were right, and to some degree they were wrong." Museums have a built-in institutional drag in addressing new pop phenomena, says Tyler Stallings, chief curator at the Laguna Art Museum and a veteran of shows on surf culture and skateboard imagery. "For collecting institutions," he says, "your changing exhibitions usually complement your mission. Most likely you wouldn't have anything in your permanent collection that has much to do with comics." Nor would your donors or the board of directors, who sometimes drive museum exhibitions, typically have personal comics collections. Carlin thinks the delay has largely been economic. "To maintain the value of a work of art — which is essentially what the gallery system does — you have to create these boundaries of value and then reinforce them." Galleries have assigned value to paintings, sculptures and installations, but because newspaper pages are mass-produced they don't accrue value as easily as an original work. There's also the issue of scale, says Carlin. "The gallery system we now see evolved in the '40s and '50s to manage large-scale heroic works of art, rather than intimate narrative work. Some things look better at museums and galleries, and they tend to sell at higher prices, which reinforces the system. While an artist who has an ironic relationship to pop culture, like Warhol or Jeff Koons, is still producing objects that fuel the system. Whereas comics are scraps." Each generation of cartoonists seems to have its own reason for being uncomfortable with a gallery setting, though some have done quite well financially from the arrangement. Charles M. Schulz, who was from the generation of craftsmen and entertainers, used to say that hanging cartoons in a museum was pretentious. "As an art form comics do not need museum validation," punk-inspired comics artist Raymond Pettibon writes in an essay in the "Masters of American Comics" catalog. "Comics are a book medium.... They aren't hung right unless they are framed by thumbs on either side." For artists who came out of the counterculture, entering the museum can be akin to selling out. Talk to a true believer — a comics scholar, a serious fan, a comics artist — and you'll probably end up discussing "High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture," a 1990 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that looked at comics, as well as advertising and graffiti, alongside work by Picasso, Lichtenstein and others. (MoMA, which has offered animation shows since the 1930s, will open "Pixar: 20 Years of Animation" on Dec. 14; fall 2006 will see "Comic Abstraction," a show about the influence of comics on contemporary artists.) Brian Walker, a curator of the "Masters" show, the son of cartoonist Mort Walker and part of the team that now produces "Hi and Lois" and "Beetle Bailey," still recalls visiting "High & Low" and seeing a comics-inspired piece by Guston. "They had his big paintings on the wall, and then here's this little case with a couple of Crumb comic books in them. 'This is where he found the stuff that he turned into modern art.' It basically denigrated comics." Walker, who in 1974 cofounded the Museum of Cartoon Art in Connecticut (which has since closed but may open in the Empire State Building next year), says he's gotten familiar with the idea that comics aren't really art. "I ran into that so many times — I'm basically numb to it at this point." The antagonism, though, has come as often from the other direction: Many cartoonists have an early, formative experience with the art world that leads to a lifetime of disdain. Often the tension starts in a college art class or at art school. Clowes, for instance, earned a BFA from the Pratt Institute in New York and turned the experience into a four-page strip called "Art School Confidential." The comic, being expanded into a Terry Zwigoff film for release next year, shows art education as dominated by pretentious trust-fund kids, nonsense-spouting professors and "self-obsessed neurotic art-girls who make their own clothes." And this pathetic bunch considers cartooning, Clowes writes, "mindless and contemptible." His experience is not unique: Ware dropped out of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Adrian Tomine ("Optic Nerve") still tells scorching stories about the UC Berkeley art class that drove him to study literature instead. "I find a great deal of contemporary art is disingenuous," says Seth, another art school dropout. "It's like academia: a small world where everyone is performing for each other, and where there are certain rules you have to follow. It seems kind of lazy to me." This disenchantment with contemporary art is not limited to cartoonists. Carlin, tellingly, rethought some of his assumptions about art while a curator in New York's East Village in the early '80s. "I felt that there was something missing from my generation of artists — a respect for craft, and a work ethic," he says. "I started to get a real respect for the craft of drawing, even though it wasn't really something that the art world valued in the late 20th century. "And then I started to hang out with cartoonists, and I realized that most of them had been precocious — but they had also worked harder at it than anybody I knew. They would really draw for six hours a day, every day of their lives. There's really no replacement for that. I grew up in this very conceptual art world where it was all about 'strategies.' " Says Seth: "Weirdly, I think that's one of the things that's kept comics from being taken seriously since the '60s — that it's too concerned with conventional drawing and telling a story, two things the fine-arts world sort of looks down on. Getting into the depths of characterization is too earnest; it makes you suspect." He speculates that the recent interest in comics from the fine-arts world may have to do with the resurgent value of beauty and draftsmanship. "I've found a lot of young artists are interested in drawing again." Reaching toward the highbrow These days, despite the sniping and condescension, cartoonists and contemporary artists are closer together than they've ever been. Comics have largely ceased to be actual popular culture — despite growing acclaim, comic books sell a fraction of what they did in the '40s and '50s — which may be why they seem more at home as the object of contemplation, scholarship and highbrow "influence." All kinds of contemporary artists, from Americans of the "lowbrow" movement to Japanese Superflat artists such as Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, are drawing from comics. "It's funny — when I do studio visits I'm finding a real interest on the part of artists," says MOCA curator Michael Darling. "I'm finding Krazy Kat catalogs on their shelves, or the influence of Winsor McCay on their work." So far, most of the controversy over the "Masters" exhibition has not been dismay that a museum is displaying cartoons but the choice of who's included and who's not. In a time when motorcycles, Armani fashion designs and dead sharks are inside museum walls, comics almost seem traditional, quaint. "This is by no means radical territory," says David Moos, contemporary curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canadian museum that just closed a solo show of Seth's drawings and sculpture. Moos looks at the cartoonist's works in a context of Canadian landscape painters and for its ability to solve formal problems. "Why wouldn't you expect a museum to be engaged with this material?" The future of comics in the museum may have to do with something the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art has become familiar with: quarrels over the proportion of superhero cartoons and independent comics, of one era over another. "We get more internal fighting," says curator Van Lente, "than resistance from the outside." Just like — after all — a regular museum. * 'Masters of American Comics' What: Comic strips from the first half of the 20th century Where: Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood When: Opens Nov. 20. 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Friday and Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. Closed Mondays. Ends: March 12 Price: $5; free on Thursdays Contact: (310) 443-7000, www.hammer.ucla.edu Also What: Comic books from the 1940s onward Where: MOCA, 250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles When: Opens Nov. 20. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Fridays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays. Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Ends: March 12 Price: $8 Contact: (213) 626-6222, www.moca.org

Anyone here a fan of the Portuguese Fado singer? Would you have any recommendations of records or CDS to start with?

How about - Who was Big John Greer?

There's a pretty simple rule. No legitimate organization will send an email asking you to somehow reply to the email with any sort of PIN or password. If there is any reason (such as updating your credit card for Pay Pal), they ask you to log into the site as you normally do, initiating it yourself, and go to the correct page to enter enter the information. Don't send or reply to any emails. Just go open your Amazon account yourself.

Falling In Love Is Wonderful? The Blue Yusef Lateef? Cool Low price too

I missed that. I'm there. The Taschen store is a dangerous place for a credit card though.

The Taschen site has lots of details, including that the release is in November. Sample pages. Excerpts from the book. Photos from Claxton's current tour in Europe on the home page. http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/...facts/00305.htm Taschen has several books with two editions, a normal one and a very expensive "Artists Edition" that includes prints, etc.

My condolences Alan. My father died on Sept. 28, and it's pretty difficult. Lymphoma, chemo didn't work, etc. Take the time you need for yourself, and things will get better. Adam

Out tomorrow. Very exciting. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000AYEIJ...&s=dvd&v=glance

Most of the others involve singing, where #4 is the most instrumental. If you want more instrumental, or "jazzy" try #14, although it's not the same as #4. If you want a "similar feel," try many of the others - #3, 8, 10 are all very nice, and of course the new #20 with the Either/Orchestra has instrumental passages. #13 is also supposed to be great, but I haven't given it a proper listen. I love how this series keeps getting discovered.

I am in LA, but my next few days are just dreadful, and I'm also sick. Well, Jim or RDK, send me an email or PM to let me know when/where you might meet, and I'll try to make it.

How good is the Fargo concert?

Thursday 10/6, 12:40 am Pacific Time Monk/Coltrane is #1 seller in music on Amazon. wow