clifford_thornton

Bud Powell - Hot House - (Dutch Fontana) w/ Griffin, Hayat, Gervais

There is still some interesting stuff available here. Please feel free to dip in!

Replied!

Bump for a few things I dug up yesterday...

Funny, I always get shit on whenever I yammer on about Cecil as primarily within the black music / jazz tradition and scope.

I paid maybe $10 for my vinyl of it. I like this record but wouldn't dump a lot of change on it.

I don't like getting hung up by applying a baseline to instrumental/structural vocabularies in order to make them "valid" or not. Nor do I understand why one has to limit someone's accomplishments to "only" their own immediate sphere in order to say that they are good or great. I wouldn't necessarily want to say that Hunke and von Schlippenbach are great pianists only in terms of their own respective orbits. I'd want to say that they are both masterful vis. what they do with the instrument, even though their ends might be somewhat different. These thoughts aren't easy to deal with and open themselves up to self-contradiction pretty readily.

He financed it himself. I thought the music / experience was "fun."

Braxton has high praise for Wagner and I see the connection between the two, but in the end I'd rather listen to Braxton. Personal preference.

To/from Italy and France I always ship registered and have never had a problem. Germany has been fine; only "lost" one thing and was pretty sure the guy was trying to rip me off.

Oh cool. She still looks good!

That's a good record.

Rude...

Re: Ayers, yeah, they do, you're right. There is some interesting musical analysis in there in spite of knotty comparisons (Beethoven's late quartets vs. November 1981 would leave a lot out as a simple dichotomy). If Ms. Mabley is here to "debunk," that doesn't really do much of a service to the music. Mabley not digging it is not "authority," because Mabley hasn't really made much effort with the music or really given much of a shit about it. One doesn't have to like the music but that doesn't mean it's not good or worth someone else's time, or that he didn't do the things he did. Other than that, I can't really say anything that I haven't said before. Superlatives aren't exaggerating, really - if I am guilty of anything, it's in fueling the belief that if one digs Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, 60s Coltrane, and whoever else might fall into that canon, one will likely also enjoy Dixon's music immensely. There is nothing wrong in that.

I don't have any of the Savoy gospel releases, but I've seen some of them and they do look neat.

I don't think of hype as negative. Just spreading the gospel, as it were.

Nothing wrong with 'hype' if you believe that someone's work deserves wider knowledge and/or acclaim.

Even though it is a 60s release, I really wish I'd bought that Doug Carn Trio on Savoy for $25 when I saw it, well over a decade ago. Never seen it offered as a vinyl since that time (though I think it was on CD).

It's mythical, even over here. Seems to have come and gone in a whisker ! Until a CD comes out, I guess I might just have to raise my price ceiling to get a copy. Quite often it's offered in fairly rough shape, too, which is a drag.

I don't recall anyone here comparing Bill Dixon to Webern until Moms did. Also don't recall anyone comparing Dixon to Boulez or Stockhausen until you did. Bill Dixon did what he did - take it or leave it. And it's your right to do the latter if you choose. For me, comparing music from different genres is a waste of time. In the end, there's good music and music that's not. For me, Bill Dixon's falls into the former camp. Others may feel differently. I don't think he would have wanted to have been compared to anyone. Among other things, Bill was taken by the brevity of Webern's pieces and did have a trumpet bagatelle entitled "Webern." Bill liked to say that he "just liked the sound of the word 'Webern' - what if I titled it 'Monk'? It might not have had the same ring to it.'" Picture that being said with a wink. Andrew Raffo Dewar has an interesting analysis of the piece from a musicological standpoint in his MA thesis, which I have at home and cannot quote directly right now. But it was a way to go from the lowest to the highest tones he could produce on the instrument in the shortest distance possible, in simple terms a sort of extended and somewhat particulate glissando. It's more than an exercise and less (perhaps) than a fully fleshed out composition. I am not doing it justice here but that at least gives you an idea. The thing is that composition is too much tied to having other people do the work that you originally wrote/assembled. Is it "composed" or not if only the composer (and in some cases, the sidepeople that the artist chooses to flesh out ideas) does the work? Bill has said that he doesn't want a repertory ensemble performing his music (at least in the ensuing years - who knows how long that will last). But does that mean that it's not great music? Or that it was painstakingly conceived over years of work? I heard a recent CD of Mingus covers, very well-played but without the sense of risk and almost inevitable failure that is part of Mingus' best work when he's there. Most of us would never say that Mingus didn't compose, but I would wager that we'd prefer to hear his compositions with him in the mix, for better or for worse.

Seen it once or twice but never in keepable condition. I like that early Kloss stuff. Nice score, chewy.

I would dig hearing this full session and the Trainwreck, but sadly never seen either seeded. Guess I'm just not hitting the right places.

$500 and someone might pull the trigger...

Mine's a green label of that one too. I wonder if it ever came out in blue label? Yep - got it. Re: Springboard, been trying to get that for over a decade and always come up short. Would love to have a copy.

Spoken like someone who has little interest in the subject. The work is there, so you can take it or leave it. Speaking as someone who was around during his last years, who listened to what he had to say, spent much time with his music, looked through the scores, read his notes, spoke with his students and watched him give advice to musicians (I hesitate, now, to use the word "lessons"), and to trust him to have done the things he said he did or wanted to do, I know that he was/is both a composer and an instrumentalist of a very high caliber. And for me, personally, his music means as much (if not in some instances more) as anyone else's. Nobody else has to have their lives changed by the work for it, and him, to have changed MY life for the better.