Dr. Rat

Yeah, that's the guy I was talking about. The album is actually pretty good, if you asked me. Got a fair number of spins here. --eric

There's a professor at U of M(ichigan) who does a credible version of Celtic influenced jazz, and eric reed and wycliffe gordon do a *great* version of Danny Boy, and Michael Brecker was on some kind of celtic jazz project a couple of years back as well, released in Europe on a French label distributed by Harmonia Mundi. And, finally, though they are not jazz, you oughta play Tommy Maken doing Green Fields of France and the Clancy Brothers doing Lord Nelson Live in Dublin. --eric

Didn't like this one nearly as much as Readings -- the Book World review pieces are just too short. --eric

Maybe more like this. We've got a couple of these things around here, but they all look the same!

Something like this might do, if you don't mind stripping wires. It's a lot smaller than a mixing board. Stick on amp

Don't they rotate? Or revolve? Or whatever it would be? --eric

I tried the Tipica 73 test on this web site and they passed. Is Descarga in the U.S.? Yes, they're in NYC, I beleive. They are another collector- and dj-driven outlet . . . lots of stuff on the website and they usually have everything Latin that's currently available. I haven't gotten a catalog of late, but I used to love kicking back and reading the "best" lists they used to have in them from the likes of Al Santiago and Poncho Sanchez. I think these are online, now. --eric

From what I've been able to gather the folks who owned Roulette and Tico sold the Tico Catalog to Fania, which is now owned by Sony (RMM). I think. Roulette (bereft of Tico) was later sold to EMI. --eric

they don't? Where can I find that discussion? God discussion

Some great music, for sure. But when I bought the CDs some years back, the remastering was . . . not up the standard of the music. Have there been newer better issues since? --eric

I occasionally get irate phone calls from listeners who just HATE the amount of Afro-Cuban stuff I play. I solved that problem by playing more and now they don't listen anymore. But there definitely seems to be a contingent of the folk who really like standards and tin-pan alley stuff who simply can't see around the corner with Afro-Cuban music. Just noise to them. --eric

I wonder if they'll do good reissues of Tico stuff--lots of good stuff on that label that can use a decent remastering (early Plamieri, for instance). That'd be way cool. --eric

Sigh.

Machito profile

Machito with Flute to Boot, Roulette SR-52026

I think there is a value in books, though. No mater how directly you experience something, it gets contextualized, and white folks (or other outsiders) who experience, say, the blues scene in Mississippi directly tend, I've found, to contextualize the experience most crucially as an event in their own personal, distinctly upper-middle-class bildungsroman. Experience is simply wasted on most people. --eric

It's "primal stew", not just "stew". Big difference. The basic ingredients-from which all evolution preceeds, to be found in various combinations, proportions, and mutations as the evolution proceeds. Yet, elements that can nevertheless be identified. No need to ignore categorical distinctions, just as there's no need to overlook commonalities. Gospel and blues have different identities simply because they are different strains of evolution and have picked up distinct traits along the way. Yet, the common traits allow for frequent and fertile cross-pollination, which in turn further the evolution of each. "Different" & "distinct" need not mean totally different or totally distinct. No, not all African-American music is infused in the blues, simply because not all Africans became Americans under the same circumstances, nor have they experienced the cultural dynamics afterwards. Any talk such as this is (or should be) based on generalities, what can "safely" (hopefully...) be presumed to be "the norm", based on what can objectively, in terms of simple numbers, be observed to be the rule, rather than the exception. Anything that does not allow for variances, even minor ones, or consideration thereof, is barking up the wrong tree, I think. Absolut is a vodka, not a sound sociological principle. As well, the notion that there is a primal stew should certainly not imply that influences from "outside" said stew can't or shouldn't find a place in the evolutional mix. Jazz itself is vivid proof of how wrong a notion that is. But they come into the mix, they don't destroy it. The same fundamental elements of the stew continue on. Change is not necessarily destruction. Soul comes from gospel? Well, yeah, but Gospel itself came out an infusion of blues "elements", many of which themselves, as Mr. Litwack suggested, may well be traceable back to pre-blues music. "Gospel" and "spirituals" are two distinct, different types of African-American religious music, yet, again, they can't be said to be totally different musics that have nothing in common. The primal stew is real enough. What we choose to call it is fair game for debate, but its existence isn't, I should think. If we chosse to deny its existence, we turn musical/cultural evolution into the equivalent of Creationist Absolutism, a set of forgone conclusions just waiting to happen - this is this, that is that, and there you have it. That just ain't so in any kind of life. Considering the discussion we had about evolution a while back, the notion that it's basic principals somehow don't apply to music kinda tickles me! I recall that spirited evolution discussion fondly! (Strictly secular spirits!) Coincidentally, I happen to be reading a book on nature imagry at the moment and one of the points this book makes is that "nature" or "evolution" as conceived as "balance" or "development" is a much abused notion, and that our ideas of nature should include ideas like "catastrophe" and "extinction" and "decay" much more to the fore. So that we might imagine Albert Murray taking up your organisimic metaphor and saying that while black music may be evolving, it is threatened with extinction at the moment and can only be saved through some sort of intervention. The question is, will that intervention be a return to an earlier form or a mutation into some new one? Anyhow, I am all for the primal stew image and I can see it's usefulness and I certainly see the real truth in it. BUT, on the other hand, I think we ought to have some specific ideas in mind when we say "blues." My argument against AllenLowe would be that the formal definition he uses is just too narrow. Too many knowledgable folks say "blues" after they've heard just a few bars or even a few notes. And I don't think when an old timer says Bunk Johnson was a blues player that he meant he played a particular chord sequence. I think the idea of "blues feel" has a pretty long precedent, and that that idea is actually a lot more important than blues formally defined. Of course someone like Albert Murray likes this vaguer notion of blues because then he gets to withhold "blues" status from whomever he likes, at will. But when someone says Jack Teagarden could sing or play the blues, they aren't referring to a chord sequence, they are talking about a feel, and that feel is the thing. I just think that we can put SOME parameters on what that feeling is, as elusive as distinctions may be sometimes. --eric

Ironically, Levine is Peretti's mentor. The student has not exceeded the master. At least not yet. --eric

I wouldn't really say so, myself. This is an example where the precise evolution of different manifestations of the "primal stew" gets hard to document correctly. Blues and African American religious music have cross-fertilized themselves several times in the 20th century. "Soul" involved an infusion of modern gospel elements into R&B and jazz. In the 1930s, the infusion was in just the opposite direction. So has it also been, to a large degree, since the 1960s. Some of the older bluesmen have associated the origin of blues with the revivalist camp meetings of the 19th century. These meetings encouraged the development of freer singing than was usually allowed in the church. I think that it is an interesting idea. There's a certain slipperiness to the stew idea that seems to allow one to sometimes ignore categorical distinctions between something like "blues" and something like "gospel" and sometimes to make free use of said distinctions as if we all know what the distinctions are. I'm not saying that you are being disingenuous--these are confusing matters. But we do quickly get to a point where we have to question why "gospel" seems to have a distinct identity and yet we steadfastly refuse to give one to blues--implying that, after all, all black music is suffused in the blues and all of it can be called blues or comes from blues and none can be said to be not blues. To me this seems a lot like a reaction to Murray and company using "blues" as a stick. By emptying the word of any real significance we take the stick out of their hands. But "blues" just doesn't equal "good." It's not an evaluational term. My reaction to most soul is that the blues elements in it are relatively small (and we have a show called "Blue Soul" here, mind, so I recognize there are exceptions) but soul music seems to me to come substantially out of church music traditions that in many cases explicitly repudiated blues and built a tradition that sounded disticntly different from the tradition they (the folks who helped create the gospel tradition) identified as "blues." So I guess I see the stew--life always seems to be a stew--but I don't acknowledge referring to the stew as "blues" as a useful or desirable practice. I'm not sure I want to go all the way down the AllenLowe road by adopting a strict contructionist chord-sequence definition, but I think we need to have a more limited definition for the term to have much use. --eric

Hmmm. I hadn't heard about the accuracy problems. I read his creation of jazz book when it first came out and found it to be a bit dull, but found my picture of turn of the century America filled in a bit. I'll see if I can't find anyone else writing on this point. The Bessie Smith myth is of course just too good not to be true for New Historicists! --eric

I've read some Peretti, and I think he does a good job of contextualizing. He could do better with the music, yes, but I don't think he's gone off the deep end. And I do think his contextualizing can enrich one's understanding of the music. But he definitely is not the sort of writer who sends me running back to my old records. Some of the other folk you list seem to be New Historicists, and here, with music as with literature, context sometimes seems to completely overwhelm the art/artifact under discussion. So that discussion seems to drift toward "What X would have written/played/said given the historical circumstances" rather than what X actually did write/play/say. Ironically, in many cases the art in question is one of the most important and evocative remnants of the period we have, so we ened up reading a vivid piece of art through a frame made of scanty and unreliable historical data. A recent Atlantic article on this issue focusing on Stephen Greenblat and Shakespeare, but the criticisms applicable pretty broadly to new historicist criticism. --eric

Wouldn't spirituals and gospel be the more important "origins" of soul music rather than blues? And I think we'd best separate out the two threads here: "blues" as a (hopefully) distinct set of musical practices of which we (hopefully) can trace the origins and influences; and "blues" as a general use category, which may get applied to a lot of things that have little or perhaps even nothing to do with those musical practices. So I think you guys are really barking up two different trees, no? Or don't I get it? --eric

Can you give us an example of an academic who is doing this? --eric

My impression is the willingness to lose money on big artists is in decline. --eric

This thread reminds me of a couple of things we've discussed before, one is Gunther Schuller's Early Jazz, which suffered a lot from a (I perceived to be political) agenda to tout the almost exclusively african origins of jazz. Which is a pretty big claim consiodering that we are now questioning the exclusively african origin of blues! This thread also reminded me of a couple of earlier threads about Elijah Wald's book on the legacy of Robert Johnson, which among other thing tries to complicate the story of the blues' origins and early history. Wald post 1 Wald thread