Dr. Rat

The Havana to NY, I think is on Caney. This contains a lot of the jam session material originally issued on Panart. The "More legendary Descarga sessions" would give you more, but there is more, different material on the "Jam Sessions in miniature" cd currently available, and more material that I've heard that isn't on any of these records, some with Cachao or Orestes Lopez leading, some of near or equal quality with other folks leading. The whole discography is messy, which is why I am wishing for someone to come along and reissue the material in an organized fashion. --eric

I emailed Thom Jurek about the strange reference in the review -- apparently it was garbled in the editing. He'd originally written something about this being the first time Eddie and Charlie co-led a band, or something, but I guess we'll see: they're supposed to fix it straightaway, --eric

These are the ones I've got as well. They're very good reissues. The "More Legendary Descarga Sessions" has a softer, more melodic feel to it that I always relate to the presence and influence of Orestes Lopez (Cachao's brother) on piano (he's there, I think, though he's not credited above). There are more pieces similar to the "Orestes" pieces that the Caney collections don't pick up that I've heard on other European knockoffs. Hopefully someone will get these wonderful 1950s sessions together properly at some point (there's also some material with Julio Guitierrez or Fajardo at the helm, I think). --eric

Something happened. I lost it for a couple of hours there and only now am able to get the site again. Last time I think there was some sort of DNS problem. Is there a way we can circumvent this problem by enetering the DNS number directly or something? --eric

I am a Cachao nut: I have most fo this material already: it's great. If you don't have it and have any inclination toward cuban music and/or afro-cuban jazz, consider it seriously. Great, great stuff. --eric

I can third this rec. A couple of tracks were collected on an old english cd from soul jazz: excellent stuff. I'm buying. --eric

The guy who wrote about BN deleting reviews also had this to say: And if the "scathing" reviews were all of the "he's not a nice man, I don't like his music" or "I think trashing Wynton makes me look smart and sophisticated" type, thank you Blue Note. Personally, I find most of WM's music to be pretty tiresome, but not even close to as tiresome as his critics. I just love the guy who labels WM "the man without a sound of his own," and I'm thinking "Man, get yourself an argument or an observation of your own and post that." But anyhow, I'm still digesting the title cut. On first flush I very much dislike the episodic format. The thing doesn't seem to develop, really (JSngry's point, I think) --eric

For my purposes here, Brittany is NOT an artist. She's just famous, and famous is a whole other category of valorization. But, someone like Jason Moran, he works. The fact that he doesn't get quite the sort of props we might want to see him get as an artist is a function of how important the category is. Kinda like the messiah. Most everybody thinks the messiah is really important. They revere him in anticipation of his appearance. He will save us all. But anytime someone comes along and says "I'm the messiah" we stone him to death. It's like that with living artists. Artist is a really imporant category, but we look askance at people who claim to be one. They might be false artists. They're trying to rise above their stations. They're frauds! They just aren't all that good. So living artists don't ofetn tend to get all the respect they might otherwise get, but certainly being Jason Moran gets you a lot more mileage that being a steam pipe fitter. And once he's been dead a while, the hagiography can start. --eric

I'm wearing socks. --eric

I see what you mean about the negative moment in this stance. Way overdramatized and . . . Wagneresque. Call me a stupid optimist, but I'm hoping this is an immature stage for Wynton, at least. I used to teach at Rutgers, and I've had some personal exposure to Marsalis and one of my students had worked with him a fair deal in clinics, etc. I can say: detached as he might be from the mainstream, he can be a very positive influence and role model, and this seems to be an extremely important role for his own self-image. This is something I've been thinking about a lot of late from different angles. The role of the artist in our society has grown substantially beyond creating aesthetic artefacts. There's a new book out about the "new economy," the rising class of information and technoilogy workers, and the importance of artists in how these folks conceive of themselves and what they do. Though artsists aren't getting rich, and they might not feel they get a whole lot of respect personally, the role of artist is pretty heaviliy valorized in our culture. So I think the figure cut by the artist, the "great man," does have social impact. Certainly this was something Ellington felt strongly: his life was the role of a lifetime. Baldly: artists can be very important role models. The Marsalis/ Murray diagnosis of what's wrong is being echoed now by a public televison series on black america by Henry Louis Gates, and part of his solution is a better class of role model. --eric

He's definitely talking about America as a whole. That's the whole thrust of his vision - derived from Murray and Crouch. They aren't interested in operating in a black ghetto, or anything approaching. Marsalis conceives Jazz as this artform that's been invented by blacks, but has transcended its origin. Q: How closely is jazz tied up with the experience of African-Americans? WM: It's inseparable - in its inception. They created it. But why has who created it become more important than what was created? It has transcended its inception. the ancient Greeks have come and gone, but the Iliad is still here. American Heritage (same interview as above) 1995 He isn't identifying with blacks. They are "they" rather than "we". Who knows what his political views are? He doesn't talk about them. Simon Weil Yes, you're right, he's specifically referring to the national culture generally, but you can't discount the context. It isn't that he's thinking of restoring "culture" or his idea of it just to the ghetto, but that his sense of urgency on this question derives quite crucially from the position of blacks in this country, where there are proportionately half the number of black men with college degrees as white men, where young blacks go to horrible schools and where blacks themselves often seem to have a very ambivalent attitude toward education. To people like Marsalis, a lot of this crisis in the ghetto comes down to cultural failings both within the ghetto and in the society at large (blacks, having the least in terms of power and wealth, naturally suffer most when the purely cultural assets of a society wither. If being American is buying lots of neat shit, ghetto blacks are in trouble, because they don't have the economic resources to participate). So though the culture theme here is directed generally, I don't think it can be looked on apart from the racial context. --eric

I guess what I'm saying is that the Crouch/Murray line of thinking is also analagous to a lot of cultural preservation movements which we would probably agree are generally harmless, or at least not comparable in level of perniciousness to Naziism. Murray does seem to have the same sorts of ideas about the content and function of culture as did Wagner. To speak just to the (admittedly important) "general cultural" thrust of this line of thinking, rather than to it's more particular import to someone who sees himself as a black american cultural leader: America has a problem with cultural identity formation. I used to teach a course with 19-year-olds focussing on just this point. The usual consensus answer to the question "What does it mean to be an American?" was "Consumptive participation in the cornicopian American economy" (I paraphrase, of course). While this is wonderfully inclusive (so long as you've got money--love gets you nowhere here), it seems to me to be impoverished, as well. The sense of impoverishment is not lost on 19-year-olds, either. They sometimes expressed a sort of envy for minorities who at least are "something" (even if something viewed as negative in some quarters) rather than "nothing." This, I think, is dangerous. It makes us vulnerable to the cheapest forms of jingoism and nationalism because they offer "something." Illusory as it might be, a well constucted national identity might well be far better than one that's just left to be essentially nothing. --eric

On the Listeners' Manefesto: Now you're scaring me! He's definitely got his opinions, which is cool. I think his recommendations of old neglected books are pretty spot on (I read Samarra and another of his recs, to my profit). On DeLillo-- well, it may be because I am deeply contrarian and everybody my age seems to think he's God, but I've never really been able to appreciate him. I guess I just don't think he's half so clever as he thinks he is. I thought, for instance, his Hitler studies joke was on the one hand dreadfully obvious and on the other hand misleading as to what makes academia tick. I think my disappointment may be that DeLillo doesn't really have any critical distance on academia. His satiric edge is dull, he makes relatively light intellectual demands, his critique is ultimately reassuring to those involved in publicly financed intellection, and that, for me, explains a lot of his popularity. I find myself agreeing with the manefesto's critique of the opening scene in White Noise, for instance, and, well, I kind of said "yeah, right" when Dale Peck trashed him in passing. (I admit it!) Though I have to say, in spite of my agreement with many of his opinions, I do find Peck's manner gets tiresome pretty quickly. --eric

There was a reasonably interesting article condemning modern novels in favor of the like of O'Hara in the Atlantic here. Might be good fodder --eric

But there are a lot of versions of this argument. Is it poliitcal? Certainly. But there are differences in how they are political--what they are up to and why. Wagner, heinous as he could be, was not Goebbels. (One big reason: he wasn't a government minister.) And the traditional national policy of, say, preserving and encouraging French cultural difference is another thing. And the encouragement of Irish and Welsh language studies is yet another thing. And then there's Leo Strauss, not to be confused with Carl Schmitt . . . you get the idea. I am highly suspicious about a lot of these "conservative" cultural lines of thought, but I think it's a mistake to be too quick to think of one version of it as an analogue of another. --eric

You really think the series was that boring? --eric

This is from Jazz Times, it was mentioned in the Forum before, but a WB promo person emailed me the text, so I figured it would be OK to repost here for discussion fodder. ____________________________________ Ideology, Burgers and Beer (from Jazz Times) by Brad Mehldau When I was first living in New York in 1989, a bunch of us musicians used to head over to the Corner Bistro in the West Village after the gig around 2:00 AM for their character-building half-pound burger and draft beer, accompanied to music from one of the best jazz jukeboxes in Manhattan. I think it was the drummer Joe Farnsworth who thought up a ridiculous but irresistible kind of word game that we often played there. The idea was to think of pairs of jazz musicians throughout history with the same first name or last name, pit them against each other, and then pick the greater. Around the table we would go, taking turns as one person would formulate a pair, and then the rest of us would choose our favorite. Examples would be: Elvin Jones or Joe Jones? Wynton Kelly or Wynton Marsalis? Paul Chambers or Paul Gonsalves? (There was one night when this doubled as a drinking game. The rest of the table had to go bottoms up if someone could think up an adjacent last-name/first name two-gender pair -Shirley Scott or Scott Henderson?) As the night wore on and the dollar-drafts kept flowing, the game usually degenerated into random pairings that spread out into all realms of culture - Greg Brady or Greg Osby? Lonnie Plexico or Lonnie Anderson? Keith Jarrett or Keith Moon? Then it became a typical Gen-X affair, and we got a kick out of yoking the jazz musicians and pop-culture figures together as an end in itself. The game had a certain purity precisely because of its inanity. How could you choose one person over another in an arbitrary pair like that? It was impossible! Joe was always there to remind us, though, of the simple conditions of the game: "You have to choose one." Another rule that was almost always enforced: After you make your choice, own it with no apologies or explanations. Likewise, no one else was allowed to comment on your pick any more than a monosyllabic groan or grunt. It was onto the next person immediately. The effect was sublimely ridiculous - a rapid-fire barrage of written-in-stone value judgments against the absurd backdrop of matching first and last names. The subtext of the game was that making comparative value judgments always smacks a little of the absurd. "Player X is more important in jazz history than Player Y," is a 'substantive' statement, following legal and political commentator Stanley Fish's gloss on that word. This kind of statement implies that further debate is redundant and worthless, although, alas, not everyone will grasp that implication. A real-world analogous statement is, "Every unborn child should have the right to life." Fish's point is that you don't waste your time trying to argue against this kind of belief or reach a consensus with the person voicing it. If you disagree, your best tactic is to put your own view forward just as unapologetically, and lobby even stronger for its application. How analogous are political and aesthetic substantive claims? In our game, we were poking fun at the overblown seriousness that surrounds aesthetic judgments. We were being contemptuous of the political tone of these 'who's the greatest in the history of jazz' discussions. Why all the gravity? You'd get someone proclaiming that Wes was the end-all on guitar, everything after him was shite, and these new players today were desecrating the legacy of jazz guitar. It wasn't so much the statement itself; it was the tone -all the tragic resignation of a Trotskyite who saw his original dream go up in smoke. I mean, we're not talking serious world affairs that will affect humanity here. It's just music! Right? On one particular night, though, we fell into one of those dead-end 'who's better' discussions. Lapsing into grave, weighty tones, we became the butt of our own joke. The pair in question was Sonny Rollins/Sonny Stitt. It was a perfect specimen of the game - apples and oranges, completely useless and ridiculous to pick one over the other. Regardless, the majority of the group went with Rollins, but a few chose Stitt. This was one of the few instances where we broke our no-explanations rule. A long, protracted discussion followed over just what the criterion for everyone's choice was. My camp maintained that Rollins beat out Stitt. Undoubtedly, he's one of the greatest improvisers that jazz has ever had. His winning greatness for us, though, was his double attribute: Not only are his improvisations so inspired, but Rollins' solos often have a compositional logic that compels you to listen in a different manner. He pioneered that approach on the classic 'Blue Seven' from 'Saxophone Colosssus'. There's an organic way in which the motifs generate themselves out of each other. His opening melody drifts seamlessly into the solo; it's all one large idea. Rollins wasn't just blowing an inspired improvisation. He was building an edifice, erecting something that would stay standing through time because of the internal logic holding it together. To cement our argument in favor of Rollins, we dropped the big 'P' word: Profound. The other guys maintained that Stitt was the greater because he was just a player - pure, unadorned great bop. As the discussion went on, it turned out that the whole 'compositional' approach, represented by a host of icons including Monk himself, lacked greatness for these guys. My camp was outraged, seething. What the heck did they mean? We had a strange feeling of disorientation, like on a Twilight Zone episode - were they the same musicians we had just been gigging with? Who were they, if they couldn't get with Monk? Or maybe they were just trying to be provocative. We quit the name game at that point and got all serious. The binary here was 'more compositional player' vs. 'just a blower'. Example: Monk vs. Bud? Their answer unflinchingly: "Bud." Note that the word 'just' was not pejorative for them. On the contrary, to be just a blower, albeit on an inspired level, was what jazz was all about. Bird personified that. Those solos on live records like 'Bird With The Herd', when he sat in with the Woody Herman Band, or a record like 'One Night in Washington', are dangerously, menacingly good. 'Just blowing' was what made jazz more punk than any punk rock band could ever be. To be able to blow a solo like Bird - profound, gripping, full of urgency and beautiful mortality - but to do so, like him, with the casual ease of someone standing at a bus stop - well, now that was something that might be called 'great'. That ease couldn't be hindered by compositional elements, because 'composition', was, in their line of argument, anathema to jazz. It was everything that Bird was escaping from; it was what made his music so free and joyous. A Bird head like 'Anthropology' was something that came more out of his improvisations. It was pasted together almost as an afterthought from the most inspired bits of his solos. Building too much compositional logic into your solo was a flaw for the Stitt camp - an affectation that got in the way of the flow. It implied pretentiousness and an overly apparent intellectualism that wore thin and didn't stand the test of repeated listening. Bop was Mecca for the Stitt camp, and Bird was the prophet. Their favorites followed in his footsteps through the hard-bop era: noble, unaffected players who were usually more obscure, like Tina Brooks, Ernie Henry or Bill Hardman. Monk's improvisations were informed by his compositions; Bird's compositions were informed by his improvisations. In that assessment, they couldn't be more opposite, and lumping Monk in willy-nilly with a 'be-bop revolution' is misleading to a point. He has a very different kind of genius than Bird - more a composer's genius. One might put him in a lineage that includes Duke Ellington. That would also be limiting, though. Monk, like Sonny Rollins, was also an incredible improviser who soloed with that same 'waiting at the bus stop' nonchalant greatness as Bird. His solo on 'I Mean You' may refer to the melody of the song, take it apart, and reconstruct it. But that was within the context of an improvisation, one that had the same killer casual profundity of Bird. Monk was certainly not getting caught in the net of his own compositional logic; he was just being a genius. These guys were stubborn, though, and wouldn't back down; neither would we. We finally sulkily 'agreed to disagree'. A distinctly ideological strain had infected the discussion, killing our buzz. In politics, ideology is dangerous - from 20th Century examples down to the present 'Washington Consensus'. Ideology pastes what appears to be a thought-out argument onto a substantive claim that is more animalistic than logical in nature: "Because of facts A, B, and C, we should all band together in a tribe and demonize those other people." Ideology uses logic selectively, in a sneaky, backhanded manner. Its aim is that we actually suspend our sense of logic and, with it, our moral radar. Then we'll be in mute complicity with what's to come. Musical ideology is similar in that it asks us to suspend our aesthetic judgments and acquiesce to its claims. It collects facts and interprets them broadly in the same manner: "You cannot dig this music as much as that music because..." Why do we often identify practitioners of jazz ideology as conservative? It's because of the parental, Old Testament ring to their utterances. Those utterances are analogous to the quasi-religious words of the Bush administration, spoken to us as if we are children who still believe in Santa Claus. Because of the specious, ideological tone, though, we cannot trust this parent and do not look up to it. We don't like being told what to enjoy musically anymore than we like being told what constitutes being patriotic. There's another kind of musical ideology, though, that's more self-imposed and private. I can identify it in myself, although it's hidden under a veneer of it's-all-goodism. I think many of us carry around some kind of ideology about jazz to varying degrees, because its marginalized status in American music stokes our partisan fury that much more. (See: Ken Burns documentary.) This kind of ideology bothers me because it's intractable. It hasn't been imposed on me by some outside authority; it's my own personal dogma. Is it perhaps steering my whole aesthetic sense covertly, calling the shots from behind a curtain in the shadows of my Id? For instance: Is my lack of enjoyment of most of what's called pop music these days simply because it sucks, or is it because I'm unwittingly locked in the grips of a musical elitist ideology? Maybe I'm missing something vital; maybe I've become the proverbial old fart! Where does the ideological baggage stop and the real pleasure begin? Is there a hard line between the two, or are they all mixed up in each other? Perhaps they're not entirely severable. I have music that I love, and ideology is a weapon that I might use to defend and argue my love, which is tempting but absurd. After all, how do you defend a gut level emotion? What's more, why would you? Kierkegaard writes wisely, "To defend something is to disparage it." It's the mantra of the high road. If you love something, you should be all quiet and spiritual about it, not needing to justify it, right? Wrong! How could we survive without the bitchy, bickering fun of polemics? Maybe we get defensive over our various musical loves because they define who we are. Love is exclusionary. You can't love everything, all the time. That goes for a critic or layman, and also for musicians. When you build your identity as a player, you do so in part by excluding a bunch of other identities, at least temporarily. That process of exclusion is determined by the gut, not the intellect. It's tied up in the murky morass of subjectivity - early musical and non-musical experiences, innate personality traits, etc... We laid that process of exclusion bare as we played the name-game. The arbitrary humor of the game was a salve, a way of keeping our own self-irony lest we lapse into ideology like we did that one night. At the end of the day, we all dug Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins both. It was a name pair that just shouldn't have been uttered in the first place. Whatever the case, I've discovered something great about listening to music and playing it. You may necessarily exclude great chunks of music in the process of building up your aesthetic. You can always surprise yourself later on, though, when music that you weren't initially ready for reveals itself to you in all its beauty. If only our government would surprise itself and us in the same way. At its present course, it is opting for the exclusionary course, guarding its belief with a desperate, violent love, full of folly. It is truly disparaging the thing it defends. © Brad Mehldau, September, 2003

I think they are much more interestingly seen in the context of contemporary black politics (black nationalism, increasingly complex class divisions amongst blacks, large scale failure of inner-city education, both of the official and "handed-down across the generations" type, etc., etc.) They make a number of more general aesthetic points, but I think that the point of origin within a struggling but culturally extremely important and highly visible minority is really what is crucial. Introducing their dreams to the consumers is their dream, I suppose, but I don't think that is avoidable. What art does not do that, strive for that in some way. That's what it's all about, isn't it? One of the problems I have with Adorno is that sometimes his critiques of the corrupt aesthetic object or the corrupt aesthetic process end up being, in truth, critiques of the aesthetic as such. His critiques are so thoroughgoing that he himself has no ground to make the critique from--this goes for his critique of instrumental rationality as well, which quickly becomes a critique of reason as such and an argument for the impossibility of critique --eric PS Personally, I love old jazz of the 30s, but I have to admit that a lot of it was just churned out. As was a lot of copycat bebop. I enjoy a lot of the churned out stuff nonetheless, corrupt as I am.

I wasn't implying that he did. The implication was the certain brands of conservatism that focus on cultural purity and standards in the face of inevitable change have tended to view jazz as a musical plague. Jazz has usually been happy to subvert (unintentionally or otherwise) received hierarchies and narratives. That's part of its great beauty: it tends to do what it wants, and that scares conservatives. I imagine that's probably a big part of the reason Crouch, Wynton, and Co. are so interested in erecting a sort of official jazz historical narrative with its own value scale, canon, and preservationist museums (e.g., Lincoln Center). And composer. Some of his works have been recorded. Jazz is a threat to no one. "Subverting hierarchies" is meaningless if no one is listening, and if those hieracrchies are old hat and stupid for practically everyone who does listen. Adorno was making an aesthetic point: he beleived that aesthetically challenging music could be personally transforming. He did not think jazz measured up--and I think if you go back and listen to the bulk of what was getting pumped out in the 1930s and 1940s, you'd probably agree that the transforming possibilities of the music was, shall we say, minimal. It was a highly commodified form. Adorno didn't like art in the form of a commodity. One could argue that this critique is what motivated Ellington to start working in more extended forms and inspired Gillespie and Parker to start laying the groundwork for bop. The reason everyone is so down on Adorno is that he chose jazz as a subject for attack, and that's something that we're all supposed to valorize today. I think it could weel be argued that Adorno's opponents are the ones who are conservative: they want to keep art safe & trivial. Adorno is fighting for an art that is more than that. I think that certainly Murray and Crouch and Marsalis have absorbed some of these critiques of commodity form in their "anti-hip-hop" moments. But there is a lot more going on--politically, socially--in their work than what we'd simply label perjoritively as "conservatism." If it is conservatism, it is of an engaged and thought-out sort rather than of a knee-jerk sort. Which is not something that can be said of many of the reactions they've inspired. --eric

I think there is a middle way here: I don't think we need to dress Armtsrong up as a tragic figure to recognize that he had rather limited options as to his public persona, and that that public persona has done much to interfere with his reception as an artist in many quarters. This doesn't make him tragic. I suppose it does make him and us flawed, though. --eric

The "Cuban Fantasy" cd is very nice. We've been playing it quite a bit here. I'd have to agree with JSngry on evaluating Fischer generally. I'm a big fan of Tjader's and often lamented his association with Fischer. I always thought what Fischer player was interesting, and sometimes (it seemed to me) he'd lend just the right sort of harmonic touches Tjader's music needed, but more often he pushed it in the direction of "sophiticated kitsch" if there can be such a thing. LIVE, though, Fischer seems to be more of a positive force. The Cuban Fantasy material is as good as Here and There, and maybe even better, IMO.

Perhaps someone should do a retrospective. "Best of the DEEP thread" and some folks can work up some commentary pointing out what's going on between the lines and hyperlinking to detailed expalnations. We'll need a general editor, though. Any volunteers?

What's with the ballcap thing anyhow? I remember lamenting the fact that so many men wear ballcaps when I was living in Philly, but then I move to Michigan and everybody has them on (unless they have a tie on, and sometimes even then). And they never take them off. They might tip the bill up so they can kiss a departed aunt in her casket, but that's about as much as they'll concede to formality. I don't get it. Maybe they're not really ballcaps, maybe they're a billed subspecies that has emerged up here in Northern Michigan. Maybe they're the next step in evolution, bound to displace everyone who has a cool hat that they take off once in a while. I don't know, time will tell. Jim, you should read Paul Fussell's Class (a couple of decades out of date now, but still hilarious--and it makes you feel better about evolution passing you by). --eric

I have to completely disagree here. That is simply not true. ´Neither the amp nor the speakers can improve the source material the playyer serves up. That's, if at all, a common misconception. Then again, the quality of CD players today is almost uniformly good, and you can't go very wrong with a cheaper model. I have two more expensive ones, and I would like to take up the challenge WNMC proposed: you CAN and DO hear a difference when swapping players of varying quality on a decent amp/speaker system. Without a problem, I might add. Cheers! P.S.: Re your problem: From what you answered so far, I would think some mechanical part is shot to hell. The same happend to an old Philips player I had ... I did open it with a friend who knos his way around and he advised not to get it fixed ... in my case the tracking was off. Years of listening to music too loud (sometimes by choice) have cost me, so I'm not ready to go too far challenging other people's hearing. But I wonder--do you know if anyone has done a good double blind test on this question? --eric

Theodor Adorno, look out! People have been writing things like this for a while (about widespread cultural decline on the consumption end of things) and it's been hard to prove because soembody can always come up with equally (or more!) horrid things people used to watch/read/listen to/eat or particpate in. But a linguist, John McWhorter (a fellow Philly boy) recently wrote an interesting book that focusses on political speeches and other forms of public discourse and the steep decline we've seen in the quality of what our leaders say. Because a lot of what he writes about is very limited in scope (speeches before congress, say) he can make pretty convincing arguments about decline. Here's a mixed review from Jonathan Yardley (who tends to be culturally on the conservative side, I think). --eric