Cornelius

"[...] a glorification of the obvious." And glorious it is!

Coleman Hawkins on "There's A Small Hotel" and Willie Smith on "Sophisticated Lady". I love this.

No thanks, Doc.

"It is my old problem with jazz critics that they view this music from a vantage point that is far removed from the audience's experience." [DizzySpells] A critic is not obligated to the vantage point of the audience (what is "the" audience anyway?) but only to his own conscience. "It is a rather elitist stance [...]" No, it's not. "[...] that does contribute to informed discussion, but not much else." An informed discussion is a hell of a lot. Just contributing to that is plenty enough to put the "much else" on another day's to do list.

"When John Coltrane finally left Miles Davis to form his own group, Stitt filled in on tour in 1960. I have a recording of him on the 'Complete 1960 Stockholm Concert'." [Che] I haven't heard those tracks in a while, but my memory is that while Stitt had a few good moments, he didn't fit with the band and especially with Davis.

Why are so many writers so unwilling to deal with the music? They tell you it's because they don't want to lose the readers. Perhaps there's some truth in that; that general readers can't absorb too much technical discussion. But it seems to me that so many writers go so far in the opposite direction - utterly inane tripe, including cliche apocrypha, "lifestyle" portraits (some people are actually proud that that's all they write about - People Magazine style), etc. And when musical content is included, it turns out incorrect - pretentious doubletalk. Meanwhile, I suspect that these jazz writers don't want to tackle the details of the music itself because they don't know much about it. It's a lot of homework to learn about chord changes and things like that. Why bother when you can slide by without it? Okay, some of the esteemed scribes have managed without knowing the mechanics of the music. But I don't see that they wouldn't have been even better writers if they had. Hentoff wrote a column a month or two ago in which he defended himself from his own conscience about this. I found the article to be transparently self-vindicating rationalization.

Just to be fair, I guess that the poster Che was not so much blaming the author as noting that the technical passages are in fact difficult for some people. As to happy mediums, I unhappily view the balance already so far on the lite [sp intentional] side that the too infrequent stiff shots of technical and substantively musical material are just a start toward bringing us toward the medium.

It's okay that people want some easy reading. But it's intolerable that writers themselves don't demand a standard of themselves, and intolerable that good, detailed, and intelligent writing about the music is actually discouraged for being "arcane", "technical", "elitist" and all the rest. The dumbdownedness of jazz journalism and jazz writing makes me want to scream.

"I have read Nisenson's book on Sonny Rollins which I think is a little better than the Coltrane book." [Che] How could it be worse? Wait, it could be worse by being Blue: The Murder Of Jazz. That's got to be the most sophomorically bad writing about jazz ever. Then, there's Ben Ratliff...but that's another dark corner perhaps best left undisturbed.

Mike Fitzgerald, I thought about adding something like that. It really is sad that the state of jazz writing is so poor. I guess that decades ago jazz was not usually thought of as serious enough to write about with the intelligence as classical music and other art forms, even film. And, in general, jazz writing has still not caught up. One contributor to this problem is that so many entrenched jazz writers actually argue that jazz writing doesn't need to be better than it is. Yet, what's so often written in books and in the jazz magazines is just garbage.

"This book not only details Coltrane's strengths and weaknesses [...]" Musical weaknesses? By '57 (even by '56), what weaknesses? / The Lewis Porter book is top notch. Eric Nisenson, on the other hand, is the most godawful jazz writer I've ever read.

Yep, Morgan's structure and communicativeness were great. But I also enjoy Hubbard's less "linear" structural logic too, sometimes even when he wasn't so logical and seemed not to have the clarity that Morgan would have about the plan of the solo.

"Lee [...] for the most part sticks to the hard bop bag." [sal] That is true, for the most part. But don't forget that Morgan moved into other areas too. / "Empyrean Isles" [big Wheel] That's not just one of many counterexamples to Chrome's claim but it also has some of Hubbard's playing that's really funky, as at least evidence toward rebutting other posters' evaluation of Morgan as funkier (or blusier or more soulful). I don't think many of these comparative generalizations hold up.

I don't miss that there's great feeling in the playing. But I think the execution and ideas are so embarrassingly poor that it's lousy music, and especially a lousy example of Mobley (whose execution and ideas I so deeply enjoy in so many of his other recordings), the depth of feeling notwithstanding. I suspect that we humans are not likely to be anywhere close anytime soon to a satisfactory, objective aesthetic for deciding controversies such as the one we have here. But I do think that we can at least approach making our judgments meaningful beyond mere expression of taste. In that regard I am inclined to suspect that it is something of an error in critical judgment to give this album high marks, especially in terms of Hank Mobley. But, again, this does not mean that I don't appreciate the provocative reasons JSngry has so engagingly given for finding merit in the album.

Just for sake of irony, I'll play the Savoy album, since it has Morgan's name in big letters on the cover while Mobley, the actual session leader, has his name reduced to much smaller letters.