Cornelius

Someone mentioned that the Billie Holidayisms sometimes sound affected. Not to my ears.

The sound is harsh, but I guess if you want the detail, you have to bear with the harshness.

It's lousy.

I don't know how I can help you, but I am interested in what you think is especially mid-rangey. Would you mention what you think is among the worst tracks and the minutes-seconds that are especially bad?

The Jumpin' Blues is the best one, for me.

By the way, your [Chuck Nessa's] next to last post has three instances of 'I' (two of them are tacit as you left yourself off as the subject of sentences in which you are the subject) and only one mention of Hawkins and one of me. So, by your logic, that post is all about you. And your last post is nothing but three pictures of yourself laughing. Again, by your logic, another post all about you.

Your point is silly. The post was about my personal experience, so I would use personal pronouns several times. The post doesn't represent itself as being about Coleman Hawkins himself. I make plenty of posts about jazz subjects themselves including tributes (in which personal pronouns may not appear at all) to musicians and I make posts about my own feelings about jazz. Lots of people do that, and it's foolish of you to twist that into "it's all about me." For that matter, this post has instances of personal pronouns, since it is in response to YOU having made ME a subject of comment.

Chuck Nessa: NOW you have to be joking. You're claiming that I'm too self-involved just because I shared my immediate personal reaction to learning of the death of one of my heroes. Another poster shared his own experience meeting Hawkins and some of the meaning he took from that experience with the impending death of the great man. I never met Hawkins, but I love his music deeply, so, in the spirit of the other poster's intimacy, I shared my own experience, be it ever so humble. I did not even hint that my personal response was more important than the man. On the contrary, I suggested that Hawkins was so great that I felt that at least a day of my own petty life was made meaningless by the loss of the man. Nor did I suggest that my reaction is more important than anyone elses's. It's a false inference, seemingly harbored by some other hostility, therefore, to claim that I am trying to make the death of Hawkins "all about me." Two other posters spoke of their own reactions to deaths of great jazz musicians. I don't think that shows them to have a narcissistic personality disorder, or whatever it is your joke was supposed to insinuate. You know, I don't mind people having a jaundiced view, but it's sad that one cannot express the importance an artist has on one's own life without having that distorted into making it "all about me."

"Have you seen any doctors since then?" I don't get it.

I remember the morning, the moment, I heard Hawkins died. I was getting ready for school and the Today show was playing on the television set. It was announced that Coleman Hawkins had died. As I remember, there was a still photograph of him on screen as some of his music was played. I had just gotten into jazz a couple of years before, and Hawkins and Hodges were my main heros. I suddenly realized, as I had never given thought, that the musicians I had been falling in love with during the last couple of years were, many of them, in the range of death. That morning I told my parents I wasn't going to school. Hawkins passing was too big. The petty duties of being a first year high school student seemed absurd and repulsive on the morning that the great Coleman Hawkins left this world. My parents didn't like that idea, but they kind of understood.

SNWolf, thanks for another fine post. What rock recordings do you feel to be art as great as anything jazz has ever produced? I will look out for them. Anyway, I'm not sure that jazz appreciation is so cerebral. At least it's not for me. And the comparison between rock and jazz need not be one of achievability. If something sounds good, then it's not of great importance to me whether it's an effect that's difficult to produce or not. There's even a sense in which much rock suffers not from simplicity but from over-complexity. You might hear a musician playing all kinds of amplifications, distortions, and computerized effects, but he's got no tone on his instrument. Meanwhile, a jazz musician can astound you with a tone that doesn't even have a vibrato! [Old joke: The rock band is doing the sound check for one of its mega-concerts. The walls of the auditorium are shaking as the lead guitarist tests and retests every pedal, reverb, and synthesizer effect blasting from banks and banks of amps and speakers. The janitor who's been sweeping up says, "You know, last week Segovia played here. He showed up five minutes before the concert with his acoustic guitar, he took about twenty seconds to tune up, and he played a two hour concert". So the rocker says, "Yeah, some guys just don't give a shit."] Personally, I don't disdain music just for satisfying its own values and the needs of its audience, but, I wonder if there are more people than we're aware of who come to jazz through rock still expecting (even if tacitly) jazz to satisfy those needs. Jazz writing, at least, has not, in the main, improved with more and more critics, reviewers, and journalists whose first love was rock.

I like the goofiness of the cover, and I got a good laugh from JSngry's description of his stoned visions, but I'm not too impressed with the programmatic aspects of the album. First, to be fair, I have to say that I'm not usually interested in programmatics. There are exceptions, but usually I relate to an album just as a collection of tracks. I may want to re-program them myself, and, usually, I care more about discographical unity than about "album statements." "I'm An Old Cowhand" and "Wagon Wheels" aren't really even cowboy songs, are they? Aren't they mid-20th century (I've not double checked the dates of composition) members of the extended American standards book? Nor is Rollins's "Way Out West" much of a cowboy song, as far as I can tell. Then "Solitude" might suggest the loneliness out on the prairie, or, as I read, Rollins's own geographic displacement. Okay, whatever. "Come Gone" is a blowing tune; no head really (Rollins made a comment that suggests he hadn't played those changes since. Are they based on something else?). And "There Is No Greater Love" is another standard. So, as a special program, this is pretty much a wash for me. My ridiculously glib review: I'm not keen on the "let's let it all just hang" feel on the tune "Way Out West". Rollins is like he's just playing with his food. In certain places on the album Ray Brown sounds not too inspiring in the notes choice department, as well as range: Hey, Ray, would it kill you just to once in a while lean over that thing to play a few of the higher notes; you know, get out of the mid-range occasionally? Okay, so I exaggerate, but he is mid-rangey on this album. Nevermind. He's a beautiful player so there's still plenty of good stuff by him on the album. I mentioned that Manne has done much better albums. Rollins is, as far as I can recall, never unbrilliant on this one. I won't even bother trying to add to what's been said about him for over fifty years. How can you not be in a thrall listening to this man? "Solitude" is my favorite track. "Come, Gone" too. / "Even Glen[n] Miller, and Paul Whiteman had more going for them in their day than today's Smooth Jazz offerings." [sNWolf] Not only that, but I wouldn't even analogize Whiteman and Miller with smooth jazz. "A young rebel in search of a visceral musical kick, a sense of deviance and otherness, is likely to find mainstream, conventional jazz too whitebread. The irony of course, is that when that music was originally played it was out on the edge." Thanks for putting that so well. I'm struck by the need people have for music to jolt them, and to be, by nature, jolting. The need for music never to let its guard down as anything less than full-on action-ready anti-conventionalism. So rockers list their jazz faves as Mingus ('cause he was bad, man), Charlie Parker ('cause he was a true revolutionary, man), and Sun Ra ('cause, well, why do you even have to ask, or are you a cocktail party jazzbo?). Lip service to jazz, really. It's not fair for me to say this, but I will anyway: I have a certain mistrust of people who came to jazz through rock. I just don't trust them not to import that need for shock and difference for its own sake. I don't trust people who've been expecting ever greater and bigger blasts and ever more convoluted effusions to take jazz on its own terms. Those terms do include originality and innovation, but it's a much different sense than in rock. Originality, innovation. Overrated in my book anyway. Just to make variations and make something different 'cause you won't be a serious artist if you don't, seemingly no matter how stupid the result. Yeah, rock on, but you must excuse me while I go put on some good music.

I love the bonus tracks, right through the elongated cat and mouse ending on "Lover".

"Deep Night" on Cool Struttin'. Man, how I cherish it. I crack up when Mclean plays that scale figure at 5:13.

On the Cool Struttin' album I hear McLean as full toned from the start. I kind of feel your point, SNWolf, about the program losing steam. But I think that's because the first two tracks are so intense that I'm exhausted by the time the bebop head on "Sippin' At Bells" comes up. Those first two tracks - especially back to back - are so concentrated that I can hardly stand the pleasure sometimes! I mean, those '&' beats - Clark's comping, the accents, the suspense in the delays, Jones's and Chambers lurching beat, the drum rolls - are an ecstatic ordeal! When I hear the plunking figures in Clark's solos, I almost visualize the piano keys themselves sagging with all that blues ripeness - like boughs sagging right down to the ground with this ripe, rich fruit. I find that after the first two tracks, if I kind of let my mind rest as the record plays, I can recover my concentration to groove with the rest of this great album (and bonus tracks).

I have no reason to believe that Branford Marsalis thinks of the possibilities as narrowed. I'd not put those words in his mouth. Rather, it is my own fear (more than a conviction) that jazz may have already burned up most of its rocket fuel (a generality, since there continue to be innovations today). This is not outlandish; Don't we see that art forms (or at least styles) have their arcs? I love montage film. And there may be some good work being done today. But I'd be silly to insist that, dammit, montage flourishes today no less than it did in the days of Kuleshov, Pudovkin, and Eisenstein, and dammit, if you want to see montage as great as Storm Over Asia, then there's plenty of it out there today. Marsalis's albums were not just hommages. Yes, he incorporated a lot of the players before him, just as virtually all jazz musicians have done, but there is originality in Marsalis too. Nevertheless, are there really an unlimited number of ways to play the tenor saxophone? Perhaps there are. But after a while doesn't it get harder to find a sound as original as the ones that have already been claimed? After Coleman Hawkins, Bud Freeman, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Don Byas, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Stitt, Johnny Griffin, Lockjaw Davis, Paul Gonsalves, Warne Marsh, Hank Mobley, John Coltrane, Harold Land, Tina Brooks, Benny Golson, and so many more styles (I'm not even including all the individual avant-garde voices) have been taken, how many more really groovy ways to play tenor saxophone are left? I'm not saying that there aren't any at all, nor that musicians shouldn't keep trying, only that perhaps, just perhaps, it gets more and more difficult to come up with one. So, since Marsalis has such a deep and intelligent respect and love for the music, he gets caught in the quandary: Coltrane and Rollins will always be in you; you can't just throw them out of your sound and music; but how do you create your own voice and be authentic - without resort to gimmickry or "projects" (you know, albums that may be good, but are not groundbreaking, just for including a chorus of accordions) - while still playing "straight ahead" (for lack of a better term) jazz. Again, I'm not claiming that Marsalis thinks about it this way; only that I see him between that rock and hard place. And I give him all the credit. He's made a bunch of great albums. "If [branford Marsalis] could perhaps find a way out of the comfort zone of American tradition and influence [...]" [Late] I don't know that he's clinging in a comfort zone. As a musician, he hears sounds that appeal more to him than others. I don't think he's necessarily any less interested in progress if he doesn't hear the sounds coming from most of the avant-garde as ones he wants to express. "We all remember what Branford Marsalis had to say about Cecil Taylor [...]" Actually, many (most?) people misremember what Marsalis said. Marsalis did not say that Cecil Taylor's music is bullshit. Rather, what Marsalis said is bullshit is Taylor's position that audiences must be diligent to study his music in preparation for listening to it. / SNWolf, there are some Wynton Marsalis albums I don't care for, but he's made some great albums, and I don't hear him the way you do. Cheap and lacking emotional depth? Quite the contrary, for me. I also suspect that he's a target of the kind of contrarian response we were talking about. That is, the head strategy: "All the media are saying what a prince Wynton Marsalis is and that he's the saviour of jazz. Well, I'm not buying into that. I'll show 'em who's got independent tastes! Yeah, that's right: Wynton Marsalis sucks!" (I'm not implying that this reflects your own source of disenchantment with Marsalis.)

SNWolf, I'm not getting in to some of Branford Marsalis's later stuff (maybe I will, though), but the Columbia albums don't lack depth for me. The only problem (if it's much of a problem) with them is that Marsalis is so virtuousically versed in players that came before him (e.g. Gordon, Coltrane, Rollins, Ornette Coleman) that he can't resist continuing to play his variations on them. So a whole new voice does not emerge (especially a voice that's as individual as he is masterful). How can you blame Marsalis? Those guys already played most of the good shit and he's deep and intelligent enough to recognize that (I sense that he does). What they played narrows what's left to invent. You'd like to think not; you'd like to think that they only opened realms of possible new inventions. But it doesn't seem, to me and at least a few other observers, to be turning out that way. P.S. I don't feel a lack of heart and humanity in Wynton Marsalis's music - quite the contrary. Of course, we share enthusiasm for Rollins's brilliance, but I'm not struck by much melancholy in his playing (except, of course, on appropriate ballads). I know about his personal seriousness and discipline, but is he melancholic as a person? Though, you would seem to be on to something with the note that comics (or, I'd qualify, at least a great number of) comics do have a special sadness or are depressed. / By the way, on my LP copy (a Fantasy issue), his foot is not cut off so much. Also, the color is much better (not green-tinged and washed out) in the box set booklet insert reproduction than on my LP. / The poster Late mentioned Frank Butler. I'd much rather have had Butler on Way Out West than Shelly Manne (I was thinking that, in fact, while listening to Smack Up). Manne is great, but I don't feel that this album shows him in a strong light.

SNWolf, I meant ugly on the particular tracks I heard a long time ago; I don't think his sound is always ugly. This weekend I got into some Art Pepper albums and enjoyed a lot of what I heard. I'm still reforming my view of him, but so far (a tentative view) I'm finding that his tone is not ugly, but not exemplary, not beautiful, has a hollowness, not especially crafted, but when it's working for him it is astringent (in a good sense), does have a haunting quality, and its idiosyncrasies do make for good jazz. On Smack Up do I detect an Ornette Coleman influence (and not just on the Coleman tune)? Spurred by your enthusiasm, I'm very much looking forward to reinvestigating Pepper further, at least with the few albums that I have at my disposal while so many others are piling up on my want list. I've never thought of Coltrane's tone as abrasive. It's hard and cold (sometimes has a softness and warmness too), but always (from at least ca. '56) exquisitely beautiful - sometimes it literally (and I mean literally) takes my breath away. / Allen, Yeats: "we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” That's a beautiful quote.

"[...] the knee-jerk contrarian syndrome exists too, the Thou Shalt Debunk to Demonstrate Mojo. In academia they call deconstruction, although that has been getting less and less hip since it's been so brutally satirised in recent years, exposing its fundamental hollowness, irrationality and vanity." [sNWolf] Yep. It really bugs me to hear people make glib putdowns of great shit just to be contrarian or to artificially individuate one's tastes. Brutal satire. You're referring to the Sokal hoax, I guess. Oh, yeah, I love it! There's a small book out (I forgot the title and authors) that follows up on that. So trenchant.

His foot is cut. Makes it even goofier. / "[Jazz that's] a perpetual grim exercise in cathartic monumentalism [...]" [sNWolf] Thanks god I've managed to steer clear of that stuff! "[branford Marsalis] He doesn't have the sardonic, ironic, sarcastic, knowing hipness to pull off [playing like Sonny Rollins]." Perhaps Marsalis failed in the performances you heard, but if there's anyone who has the qualities mentioned, then Marsalis is one. "[...] the actual music, the basic melodies in what Sonny plays are frequently, even usually, trite, often idiotic. He has this unmatched ability to turn inconsequential fluff into salty, swinging, celebratory jazz." You must mean the melodies in his own improvisations, since (during that time, at least) the tunes he usually played on were good ones, even the corny ones. So I'm having trouble recalling his improvised lines as being usually trite or idiotic, other than quotes of trite melodies. / "Shelly looked like a putz." [youmustbe] Are you sure you mean 'putz'? "One reason I don't like Way Out West is that it's one of the records you're 'supposed' to like." I don't get that. If it sounds good to your own ears, why should your enjoyment be hampered by other people recommending its enjoyments? Anyway, I'm with you on Newk's Time!

"the most winding thread I've ever read" See. We're full of wind. Either that, or I missed the posts about Kai.

I remember hearing tracks that sounded histrionic, with grandiose emotion, and without the musical force to back it up. It came across to me like he wanted you to know all the great anguish his phrases were supposed to represent and for you to know what an emotional kaleidoscope he is. And all the while what he was actually playing was not that individual or imaginative - pretty pedestrian if you took away the exaggerations in his phrasing. And the sound and articulations struck me as ugly. Just being "raw" doesn't do it for me. He's supposed to be so hip. But that kind of thing sounds so unhip to me. There are so many other guys who are, to me, so much more soulful, so much more expressive, with so much more subtlety, technique, melody, and effortlessly compared with the overwrought emotional machinations I heard in Pepper. But my impressions of some of his later work were formed from listening many years ago, so I do want to give his later stuff another chance.

Blues In The White Honky Tonk Blues Without The Tonk Blues In The Key Of Honk The Caucasian Blues Circle White Bitches Blues The Blues Are Ofay With Me! I'm Dreaming Of A White Blusiness All White Blues The Blues Are All White With Me! The Turquoises: Blues With More White In Them Maybe do a show on fat blues singers: The Be Fat Blues Maybe a show on all white groups: I'm Ofay, You're Ofay. Let's Play! Gay blues players: Blues Out Of The Closet

That's right. I got mixed up with 'For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf'. The subject of white females singing blues is a good one. I don't know what commentary ghost of miles has planned, so I'm just saying that he should have some good commentary if he's going to make race the theme of the segment and especially if race is in the title of the segment. (I'm just making clear that I'm not discouraging the concept.)

Bummer, I said that the albums I have are mostly from the '50s and '60s. But I'll look out for the ones just mentioned by wolff and SNWOLF (thanks). It's been a while, but the last time I listened to any '70s or '80s Art Pepper, I didn't like what I heard. So many people whose opinion I respect love him, so I should reassess.