Dr. Rat

Yeah. how did we get here, anyhow?

Un peu patronising. N'est ce pas? Simon Weil Oh, I wouln't say it in front of him. But, yes I have some serious misgivings about his whole schtick. Patronizing may be about the best I can manage at the moment: it won't last, I'll either be acknowledging his superiority or bitching at him like an equal soon enough. --eric

The exclamation point or the period? --eric you mean there was something AFTER the quote of conn500? You got some nose on you. --eric

The exclamation point or the period? --eric

Right, that seems to be true of everyone I've ever met. But "holy fool" isn't a box, it's a descriptor, meant to describe people, taking for granted that the label would be an inadequate replacement for the person. "Holy Fool" is my provisional and relatively charitable interpretation (I have a soft spot for holy fools) of a person I hope to get to know better. I am one of those folks with a great concern for certain distictions: between label and thing, for instance or between metaphor and actual situation. One of the great intellectual bad habits of our era: someone comes up with a revealing metaphor for something, and promptly forgets that the metaphor and the thing it describes are still two different things, no matter how good the metaphor is. e.g.: enthusiastic readers of Richard Dawkins

You're assuming that most people made it that far into the post. Give us more credit than that, will you? That's the sort of post one smells rather than reads. Kind of like when you pull some long forgotten weirdness out of your fridge. Soon as you open it, you know its something nasty. No need to find out what exactly, just make for the dumpster. --eric Looks like the rat/mouse in your avatar has found something nasty, Eric. It's Guinness! You better watch yourself! Some folks can be pretty protective of their favorite iconic beverage. It's like liquified 50s Blue Note vinyl. --eric

You're assuming that most people made it that far into the post. Give us more credit than that, will you? That's the sort of post one smells rather than reads. Kind of like when you pull some long forgotten weirdness out of your fridge. Soon as you open it, you know its something nasty. No need to find out what exactly, just make for the dumpster. --eric

A pretty servicable definition of "holy fool," I think! --eric

Eric, I don't own a Grove Dictionary, but I do own a shelf of jazz bios and other reference books, from which I drew interesting, I thought, bits and pieces in order to compose the apparantly superfluous bios. I don't know how to "cut and paste", so I actually had to write the bios, using my reference material. It was my futile attempt to inject some sanity to the thread. I don't do imitations of anybody, or anything. I subsequently deleted the bios, sensing that the thread had become a spectator sport. My apologies if my diversionary tactic was ineffective. Patricia- Sorry, I meant to say that your contributions were a welcome relief. I love my Grove Dictionary! -- sorry if the reference seemed snide, it wasn't intended to be. If you look through my posts you'll see I cut & paste all kinds of stuff, so I deifnitely value posters who go through the trouble of getting the facts and primary sources in front of people's faces. Any snideness I think was more of a function of the context. --eric

Sorry, dude, but you guess wrong. FORCES IN MOTION is a series of interviews/observations/etc. w/a Braxton Quartet (inc. Marilyn Crispell, Mark Dresser, & Gerry Hemmingway) over the course of a two-week or so tour of England. All sorts of ground is covered, musical, political, economic, humor (turns out that Braxton is a pretty funny guy, full of whimsy and good-natured irony), you name it. It's a fascinating read, and as real a portrait of a group of musicians as I've ever read. It's appeal should not be limited only to those who like Braxton's music. Of course, if your curiosity isn't burning enough to allow for the possibility that you might enjoy such a book, or if you've decided in advance that everything Braxton has to say is going to be wrong to one degree or another because you think he's invalid as an artist (and notice I said "if" - no accusation being leveled) then don't bother. Otherwise, I'd suggest looking in remainder bins, where a copy can be had for cheap. At least in these parts it can. You are a good salesman. My curiosity good and properly stoked. We'lls ee what can be done. As to Braxton, personally--I read a bunch of the series of interviews I quoted in the former post, and though I feel its a shame his realtionship with language appears to be so tortured, and I really have my doubts about his hopping and skipping across the intellectual landscape, he has a really affecting personality. I began to think of him as a kind of Dostoyevski-esque "holy fool" or "idiot" as in "The Idiot." There's a certain innocenece or openness or something to him you don't usually see in folks. --eric

Any samples of the good stuff? -- I've waded through dozens of pages of his thread and aside from Patricia doing her best imitation of the Grove Dictionary, I found little of interest. But maybe I waded in from the wrong direction. Now THIS discussion is academic, --eric

No go on the library copy. There are two copies of Blutopia : visions of the future and revisions of the past in the work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton / Graham Lock in Northern Michigan. Dr. J's book being an expansion of this, I guess? My curiosity isn't burning enough to justify buying the thing, simply put. You don't have anything against libraries, do you? Books like Lock's probably woud have a hard time getting published if it weren't for library purchases. Just part of being in the knowledge dissemination business: there's no money in it. Chuck Nessa's level of hostility seems to allow him to wish any misfortune on me, even unto actually buying a book. --eric

Went surfing for some Braxton on this general topic and hit this iceberg of words: I hope Lock pares this down for us a bit. Man, talk about wordy! Dr. J: Were you pulling my leg with the Braxton rec.? Some irony that flew over my head. There seesm to be a lot of intellectual sloppiness behind the dense verbiage. He's wrong about the 3/5 solution, for instance. It wasn't introduced into the constituion as a way of justifying slavery. That wasn't necessary. Slavery was already happening and while some people saw a deep conflict between slavery and and the freedom and liberty talk in our founding documents, apparently this wasn't a crisis situation in 1789. The 3/5 solution was enacted so that the slave holding states could bulk up their representation in the House and be better able to protect their peculiar interests (the continuation of the slave economy), so slaves, for the purposes of the census and distribution of congressional seats, were counted as 3/5 of a person. They could not be counted as a whole person because Northern states protested aginst counting non-citizen property (which they compared to livestock) at the same rate as voting citizens got counted. The 3/5 solution was an expression of rather than a justification of the slave-holding mentality. And why all these newly-coined, pseudo-technical phrases? But, anyhow, I'll see what Lock can make of it, --eric

I think I'd dial up January 16, 1938, Go to Goodman's Carnegie Hall Concert, rush uptown to see the Basie/Webb battle of the bands at the Savoy, sleep a bit then head over to the studio to catch Commodore's first session on the 17th. --eric

Duke Ellington Al McKibbon Tata Guines

Currently working my way through the fascinating, outstanding FORCES IN MOTION: THE MUSIC AND THOUGHTS OF ANTHONY BRAXTON book by Graham Lock (I owe a BIG thank you to Jim Sangrey for putting me on to this one). After reading Braxton's insightful, clear-headed, and (most importantly) thoroughly authentic and lived-in viewpoints about issues of race in jazz, the stuff quoted in some of the prior posts just sounds so academic and inconsequential. I'd strongly suggest you check this essential book out, Eric, it'll stimulate your thinking on this topic and you'll never want to settle for anything less again. I'll put it on my list. Thanks. But, well, I ahve to wonder what makes Braxton's views "thoroughly lived-in and authentic" and others "academic and inconsequential." This topic is not, of course, on jazz and race in any grand sense, but rather about the blue note legend, my take being that from the days of Wolff, the label's image has carefully (brilliantly, I'd say) exploited a constellation of ideas and feelings about race and sexuality in this country. And that a lot of the sense of violation people feel about the current tack the label is taking is because of the abandonment of that particular constellation (it just isn't relavent in the same way today) and the effective re-imaging of the label as something different and not-yet-altogether clear. I think this point of view is eminently subtle and insightful --eric

Only for the use of bad grammar... I can't take responsibility for that particular slip -- but there's plenty of bad typing and even the occasional grammatical error in my posts as well, and unlike a lot of folks around here, I've only got the one language and an uncertain grasp on that. --eric

Name calling!

Man, you're not talking grooves! You're talking labels! --eric

Thanks Simon Weil for the Berlin rec. I'd heard of him, of course, but never read him until last night. He writes very well, and I'm finding his essays to be quite intersting. I recommend him to others intersted in philosophy/political theory. Couldn't find Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder , but the collection I've got has essays on all three. Reading about Hamann and the Counter-Enlightenment now. Proper Study of Man is the collection I've got. --eric

Here is the Ted Gioia passage I referred to above:

Aren't the results of "feminine" west coast jazz or "masculine" east coast jazz far more pleasurable and interesting than any supposed sociological explanations? In other words, its in the grooves, not the sociology. Oh, I'm open to any kind of fun. Well, most any kind. I see no conflict between enjoying my MJT+3 and wondering about the why and wherefores from a sociological standpoint. To move to a different medium, beer, I feel very very lucky that there's been a revival in "artisinal" beer making in this country. I enjoy the products of the industry immensely. I also recognize that I cultivated a taste in "strange" beer in part to distinguish myself from my peers. I also recognize that a lot of the folks who have fueled to whole rise and partial fall of microbrewing didn't really enjoy good beer very much and were more interested in becoming part of the in-group by bashing the entry-level beer (Sam Adams) than in anything else. But I still like my strange beers. Too early for one now, though, --eric

On Rozzi, he seems to be an Atlanta based critic and liner-note writer who writes for Jazziz pretty often. In fairness to him, I think the contradictory quotations may be intended to complicate the story he's telling. Below I quote from a piece publiched in Jazz and American Culture by Mark Noferi, a student of William Youngren's: Kerouac was ahead of his time, I'd argue. A lot of the ideas that were flying around in his writings on jazz were later appropriated and (ironically) mixed with some of the ideas about authenticty, rootedness and origins coming out of the trad revival to compose the ideas flying around hard bop. These ideas in large part were shared in common among (largely) black musician-leaders and (largely) white listener-fans. I think a lot fo the Blue Note myth--which I acknowledge has a basis in truth--is tied in with the notion of jazz as a particular kind of social symbol, with a particular kind of social currency, one that has a lot in common with Kerouac's perception of what jazz stood for. These values probably come across most strongly in the images of Wolff's cover art, rather than in the music, which didn't always contrast so strongly with the West Coast jazz to which hard bop was a reaction.

Straight from the horse's mouth answers aren't necessarily true. You might also have asked Louis his birthday while you were at it, and have gotten the wrong answer. Of course, we have seen no cases of jazz musicians fobbing people off with simplistic answers to such questions in the past. Certainly, it's possible that Louis went with the trumpet for cosmetic reasons (by which I suppose you mean visual ones): the trumpet was an extremely important prop for him, and it definitely has a different look to it than the cornet--but there we're going in the direction of Achtung, Dr. Freud rather than my own obsessions with sociological explanations. I think the answer to this particular question is "We don't really know why he changed, and we probably have no way of finding out for certain. We may, though, speculate using the evidnece we've got (including your horse's mouth data), either well or badly."

You're right. I've wondered about this particular quote, too--but obviously I didn't think about it when I was cutting and pasting for this thread . . . But just as well. So, did Blakey wear overalls to work, or a nice suit? And as to arrangements: I've often felt that a lot of the "hard bop" classics were pretty meticulously arranged and depended more on written out melodic hooks for their popularity than on the solos. I wasn't there at the time, so I don't really know how much retrospective restructuring of reality has been done to dichotomize the East/West conflict. I remember reading a review of Mingus's East Coasting which claimed that "West Coast Ghost" was an insult directed at bloodless West Coast jazz. But then I read later (in the liner notes, I think) Mingus quoted as saying the title refers to himself! (I suppose to his own mixed heritage in jazz.) While there was certainly a conflict between some partisans of the two coastal "sounds" sometimes it seems that later writers have gone back to clean things up a bit and draw more recognizable lines between the different camps. I think this may be an instance of this sort of thing--the reality was a bit more complicated. But I think a lot of the images being put out, even at the time, were pretty much in line with the dichotomy I lined up earlier. Whetehr or not this is a viable point of view remains to be seen, --eric