clifford_thornton

Yeah, I have that on LP -- it's a trip! Expanded Yamashita Trio with butoh dancers -- would've been a sight to see. If you like McPhee solo you'll enjoy this. It's beautiful.

Wait, I know I've been at some of your NYC gigs! It must be because I am so short that my presence goes unnoticed.

yeah, I've done the same -- cheap in the bins, and always good. The only ones I could not connect with were the Nonet albums but I could easily be convinced to try again!

Damn, what an amazing life & person. RIP.

Yup.

I like his Japanese sides with Sadao quite a bit, and with Toshiko. Beyond that I haven't really gone too deep. The date with Hinze is excellent.

Just landed yesterday -- looking forward to giving it a spin, along with those Nadja releases of Abe, Takagi, and Yoshizawa. Been working on a big writing project and in a week will finally have time to listen to stuff I'm not writing about!

That is a good obit, although the misspellings of artists' names are a bit frustrating.

yeah, I mean, that's the thing -- we all act like the internet is going to exist "forever" in the way that it currently does. Doubtful. Websites go belly up or are suppressed in favor of those that garner more ad traffic. If you want to keep something for reference decades on, you'd better have a physical copy. And yes, I am an archivist by profession.

Stivín is rad. Those System Tandem LPs are very, very good.

Totally. I've listened to (I think) all of my LPs, but not all of my CDs. So there's still much to discover.

looks like that is a "no." writing about music is a skill for sure. I do like reading what certain individuals have to say about releases that I might be interested in buying. And as someone who has done record reviews, I know that my opinion will change over time, or at least the nuances that brought me to a certain conclusion will change. That's part of the fun of appreciating art.

this just seems like fluff. like, screams it, actually. So in that sense very little has changed or will change.

Fascinating point. I don't know that aspect but if true, this is all part of a con.

Ah, dang. Well, they can understand you, and even if he can't hear he can recognize facial expressions and know where you're coming from, especially if you've had him a long time. Slow blinks also work if he can see okay.

HA! too late for an 8-track I guess.

I mostly talk to my cat.

All right, so as an LP or a CD it is probably fake.

I mean, I've questioned whether I should be writing about certain aspects of the music as a white person from a white perspective (avatar being what it is -- an homage to a mysterious musician & political figure). Questioning and being self-critical is important. I suppose that is part of what "wokeness" is about in the ideal sense and very few people get that along with criticizing the status quo, you have to hold yourself to account and be prepared to be wrong. The Status Quo did write some good songs -- Pictures of Matchstick Men is a favorite. Couldn't get into their later hard rock stuff though.

Makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. I do feel that true, systemic racism out-and-out requires power which people of color in this country do not have. But what the JT editor/purchaser exhibits is completely fucking out to lunch, regardless of how you spin it.

To an earlier point, I hardly think the jazz crowd is as monolithic as it was even five years ago in NYC. Smaller markets, suburban markets, yeah those tend to not be very diverse. Lots of reasons for this. also, I saw somewhere that JT was not going to do reviews anymore and really trim any "in depth" coverage that they used to have. The below is hardly promising:

luckily, being an ass or an idiot knows no racial, gender, religious, or other bounds. I'm not butthurt, butt... that Wayne Shorter obit was crap of the highest level. If the magazine just reprints tweets and wastes ink on calling people out rather than developing any interesting or valuable writing about music, they will continue to fail and that will be that.

Dang, that's quite a major loss. RIP.

The goose got diverted:

yeah, there's no way he would've called pieces by those titles. I suspect it is a boot of some sort.