Cornelius

"[...] 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.

In the summer of '66 my family took a vacation to San Francisco. My father, a "buckle down" Republican, made it a special point that we should visit Haight-Ashbury just to see it firsthand. We crawled the length of Haight Street in my dad's blue '61 Chevy Bel Air as we took in every detail we could. It was all very strange. But what struck us most was just how many of the hippies were eating chips wrapped in newspaper. Later my dad remarked that he could tell that there was a very special sense of sharing and humanity in what the hippies were doing.

Thanks, etherbored.

I haven't a clue how other people would take it, but I can tell you how I would: Unless you have something substantive to say about race, then I would wonder why you even mentioned it in your broadcast, let alone used it for a segment title. It would strike me as gratuitous hook. On the other hand, if you had some trenchant things to say about race and culture and music, then I'd be all ears. However, even then, I think you can come up with a better title, since the pun on "Even Colored Girls..." is too predictable for me.

I really didn't want you to schlep for quotes on my account. I know about Coltrane's spirituality. What interests me is his saying that good jazz requires a good person, just as you too raised an eyebrow at that. / In another thread you wrote: "I honestly believe, in a completely biased and subjective fashion, that [Art Pepper] is the most sensitive, most deeply-felt interpreter of ballads in jazz history, on any instrument, in any historical period. His playing is so profound and gut-wrenching it says as much about the conflicted sadness and fugitive joy of being human as the greatest art, period." I don't have the Straight Life album, which you highly praise, but I do have most of Pepper's major albums from the '50s and '60s. Would you suggest an exemplary ballad track that might be among those albums? / You've posted some quite enjoyable letters here. I hope you'll post a lot more.

What are some good straight ahead jazz vocal records sung in Japanese (either original Japanese lyrics or translations of English lyrics)?

The beats listened to great jazz. The hippies created some great rock. Based on that, I'd say, musically (cultural score 0 - 1000): beats 300, hippies 10

When I wrote "conservatives today call themselves 'libertarians'" I was being breezy, using 'today' to suggest the trendiness of conservative "libertarians." / I strongly doubt that counter-culture leftists became consumerists (some won't admit it, some admit it sheepishly, and some real assholes proclaim it) because of the self-seriousness of the left. That sounds more like a rationalization. It's more likely that these people, being human, just couldn't resist the temptations. / Searching "Coltrane beautiful person" or "Coltrane pure heart" gives pretty much the same results as just searching "Coltrane"! Anyway, please don't look for it on my account. But if you do happen upon it, I'm interested.

There's a book on this subject. I don't recall the name, but I often see the book in book stores.

Dan, You disclaim anti-intellectualism, but you say that you agree that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." I see that as a self-contradiction, unless I misunderstand what you mean by that aphorism.

Would you point to where Coltrane made those comments about the need for musicians to be good people? I don't doubt you that he said that; I'm just interested in reading more. / Conservatives today call themselves 'libertarians'. Social liberalism, but without having to pay taxes for all those welfare bums. There's no ideology there except the ideology of self-interest. As if the massive wealth of corporations is protected by some ethical-political statute of limitations on genocide, slavery, war, invasion, plunder, theft, and corruption. What a crock. / I think you mean Stan Levey.

Thanks, couw. I tink I got you now.

"[...] sanitised, respectable front as a solid affirmation of cultural seriousness and high-brow gravitas. Anything that deviates from this is dismissed by Crouch and his mates as decadence, self-indulgence [...]" [sNWOLF] I suspect that's an overstatement. / Along the lines of Allen's comments about the beats and hippies, at least these events loosened a bit the stick that goes up our culture. It seems to me that the self-permission that was demanded to take LSD and to deviate from routine ideation, art, and behavior has contributed to our freedom.

"[...] a denial of validity really isn't that far off from the failure to connect if the mode of communication is what it is all about. If someone has big problems with people intellectualising emotional reactions and proceeds to call those intellectualisations invalid, I cannot blame this person. It only denies objective validity of the intellectualisations for the person in question. It would be great if those broadminded enough to think this were nonsense would nonetheless take it as a valid opinion." [couw] I don't understand this, though I might guess at parts of what it means.

"Could you provide a couple of examples where [Mobley] plays the same thing on two different recordings?" [Lazaro Vega] Off the top of my head the first comparison that occurs to me is his blues solos on various heads during the early '60s. Perhaps "Pfrancing" on Someday My Prince Will Come could be your prototype for comparisons. Later, if you like, I could give you the chorus numbers. He plays variations on them scattered throughout other recordings. Basically a chorus or two with less variation than you might expect. "But they're usually "micro" patterns [...]" [JSngry] But there are the chorus routines too. / Interesting comments by Larry about "Cool Struttin'." I also like the comment he makes in the book about the rhythmic effects of the team of Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones.

I appreciate many approaches to writing about jazz: technical, biographical, and illustrative/metaphorical/impressionistic/sensorial/psychological (for lack of a better term for writing that describes the writer's sensorial and emotional responses in metaphors (or other tropes) that compare music to other sounds, sights, and concrete and psychological experiences (such Kart's enjoyably apt description of Mobley's tone as "like a blue gray cloud," if I'm quoting correctly). And I'd love for there to more writing that does a good job of combining these approaches. But the passage I quoted seems to go on to an ideational/metaphysical/ontological (for lack of a better term) approach. I'm not necessarily opposed to this kind of thing, but my radar of skepticism does start blinking like crazy. And in this instance, my radar gun dictated that I pull the speeding car to the curb. My feeling is that (not necessarily in order of importance), first, the prose is too dissimilar to its subject; second, the prose did not enlighten me and that some of what it is meant to convey was better articulated by Kart's own more down to earth metaphorical explanations in this thread; third, the rhythms, imagery, and voice of the prose did not appeal to me; fourth, along the lines just mentioned, for me, the particular ontological (for lack of a better word) analogies used "run past" Mobley himself in a way that distracts from digging him. I surmise that Kart does not mean that Mobley himself felt or thought about the things Kart finds in his playing. So, granted, the analogies could still be good even if Mobley did not think and feel those things; that's why they're analogies and not reports of Mobley's actual mental experiences; and I just said that I do dig analogies like "blue gray cloud." But the ontological analogies that Kart got carried away with are so abstract (and I found not too logical even as abstractions) that Kart has "upped the stakes" so that the conceits better be really well constructed now. Perhaps there's a kind of series of levels, from literal to concrete to metaphorical to ontological: For examples (I'm just improvising a rough notion here, so don't hold me to this in every detail): Level 1 (literal) "He played even eighth notes with the rhythm section's Latin beat"; Level 2 (musical illustrative) "His sound is brassy"; Level 3 (metaphorical, loosely speaking, since it could be another trope) "His tone is like a blue gray cloud"; Level 4 (a little further out) "His tone is a brittle as a skeleton on a highwire"; Level 5 (further) "His biting articulation and rhythmic displacements are the clarion call of political alienation" Level 6 (ontological): "[...] as though each move he makes has a counterpart in a wider world that might not exist if Mobley weren't compelled to explore it." (By the way, I have a better sense of what Kart means by that now, but I feel the rhetoric is inflated relative to its meaning.) So when the rhetoric becomes so attenuated relative to the message, the rhetoric demands of itself even more deft execution than casual comments like "smoky tone." Please do not misunderstand. This does not imply that I don't think writers should stretch boundaries, especially to move past expressions, like "smoky tone" that have become pretty worn out. I only find that in the passage Kart was out there, but the prose, the constructs, and conceit weren't enjoyable or meaningful enough for me to give him the rope of confidence to lead me out there with him. / Lazaro, thanks. / The import of something that someone posted is invalid. The poster teased that Dan spends a lot of time in a thread about Kart while claiming not to like or be interested in Kart's work. There's no contradiction there, though. The amount of time Dan spends commenting about Kart is likely a function of Dan's feeling that it is important to be present to keep up for his position against Kart's writings and posts and to defend himself against counterattacks. (This is irrespective of my feelings about Dan's position.)

"hey Cornelius - I think I'll go back and edited those old posts so it looks like I'm only attacking Dan Gould -" You better be joking, you time-stamp revisionist, you!

Allen, It is painfully ironic to me that I had to defend myself against charges of anti-intellectualism here. You see, arguing against anti-intellectualism, especially the view that jazz writing needs to be dumbed down, is one of my own gravamens! I get in arguments all the time with peope who insist that jazz writing needs to stay simple, simple, simple! That anti-intellectualism, anti-analyticalness, anti-scholarly, anti-substantiveness drives me NUTS! Damn, in another forum, continually, I have to defend my own posts from posters who cry that my posts are too "academic" and that the posts use what is deemed inpenetrable vocabularly (can you believe, people are offended that I am "pompous" for using words such as 'vitiate'?!). (This is not to imply that I'm some great jazz scholar.) And I've defended myself from a charge of anti-intellectuality lodged by a writer (you) whose book I've very much appreciated (with some reservations) as quite enjoyable writing, a refreshing critque (even as I may have some points of disagreement) of jazz historiography, and rescource for discovering more and more music.

"I did not challenge the reason for the book." [Cornelius] "Only by implication. The book's main theme is challenged by some criticism you laid out before." [Lazaro Vega] What is the main theme? How do my comments challenge that theme? If you construct an argument that my comments do challenge that theme, I still want to be clear that I have not personally contested whatever may be the raison d'etre of the book.