John Tynan

[JSngry]

Trane & Elvin, yep

I give Garrison major props for anchoring & McCoy the same for flying, but really, it could have been (and often enough was) Trane & Elvin.

Pretty much damn near impossible to be noncommittal about Trane & Elvin, at least back then, I'd think.

Edited March 27, 2009 by JSngry

[paul secor]

I started listening to jazz and buying down beat just after the "anti jazz" stuff went down. Sometime after the fact I wondered if at least part of it wasn't just a ploy to create controversy and sell magazines. Perhaps I'm too cynical, but perhaps not.

[Chuck Nessa]

I started listening to jazz and buying down beat just after the "anti jazz" stuff went down. Sometime after the fact I wondered if at least part of it wasn't just a ploy to create controversy and sell magazines. Perhaps I'm too cynical, but perhaps not.

The editor at the time was Don DeMichael. Don wound up being a very close friend. He loved Coltrane (said he was a major influence on his life) and I'm sure he used the situation to push Coltrane's career.

[AllenLowe]

speaking of piano, didn't Ornette record with Walter Norris early on? (I haven't listened to that one in a long time). And of course there was the Hillcrest with Paul Bley and Ornette - a black club that fired them for being too far out - Bley has said it was a good steady gig, but having to choose between steady money and playing with Ornette/Hayden/Cherry, he chose the latter (and btw it always fascinated me how much Cherry showed a Clifford Brown sonic influence on those recordings) -

and just last year Gitler and I got into a little tiff on the Jazz Research list when he used one of his usual "squawking screaming bleating" descriptions of the free jazzers. Unfortunately my final post in response was censored - (don't remember exactly what it was, but I just had had enough of him fighting that battle with the usual cliches; I think somebody else used this comparison but it really is like the Japanese soldiers who didn't know the war was over) -

Edited March 27, 2009 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

Walter Norris on the first Contemporary album, allegedly at Koenig's insistance. And the Hillcrest club was Bley's gig, not Ornette's.

[fasstrack]

. I recall a Phil Woods interview where he said that if you don't know ... I think it was something like the correct first change on the bridge of "Sophisticated Lady," you had no right to call yourself a jazz musician. (I should add that for many professional musicians of that time, a sense of validated insider specialness was among their key social/emotional rewards for living lives that could be damn difficult. You know -- "At least I'm hip, I'm not playing like Tex Beneke."

Phil was right, and he's still right---in my book. He's also a big Eric Dolphy fan, BTW. I can't tell you how many guys I've met or heard in my life as a professional that fuck up melody after melody and don't even bother to check----and they enjoy reputations as great jazz players or something---and have the egos to match. Bullshit. Learn the melody, it's cantus firmus, and not something to fudge or play something you think is 'hip'. I'm way past tired of that shit. Thank goodness for musicians like Phil and Art Farmer who stand up for the right things.

This has nothing to do with Ornette, BTW. I enjoy his music on its own terms, though it's not really my personal thing. I also spent a very enjoyable day 5 years ago at a JALC rehearsal of his music (Wynton and Ted Nash wrote some killer charts) and even got a very gracious answer from Ornette when I asked him if his music was really suitable to a big band (I really wanted to know, b/c it seemed like it wouldn't be, and I wanted to hear it from the source). He said 'that's the great thing about music. It's so........' Then he paused, and I couldn't wait for the answer. I thought he would say 'pliable' or something similar. Finally he said 'democratic'.

I don't think Ornette's music----which may or be not a language unto itself, and I profess no authority there---

has anything to do with the requirements of the professional musician, jazz or otherwise, in the workaday world of music gigs. I never call any player to do anything that doesn't know lots of tunes in every key, and I'm pretty persnickity about the definition of 'knowing' them, preferring knowledge of the lyric from a reliable singer's version. I've just seen too many jazzers play a flat nine in 'Body and Soul" b/c Trane did on a date way back when. Dumb-ass copycats too lazy to learn how a song goes, and that's what Phil meant, I'm sure. They should take their damn union cards away.....

Having said this I agree with Larry's reference to a 'resistance to the unfamiliar'---alluded to by Nicolai Slominsky in a great book called 'The Lexicon of Musical Invective' (a collection of scathing reviews from Beethoven to 20th Century music. It had a section analyzing why he felt the critics were so resistant). Intolerance is a bane, not boon, to society---and jazz is definitely a society, and a rather provincial one. But one does need to know the rules before breaking them. Any decent artist will tell you that. By way of fair disclosure, I happen to be in love with the American Song Book---it's my life's work, really. But I also see a round table in music. Any musician with something to say ought to be able to sit at it---as long as he did homework on things as basic as the right friggin' melodies, how to keep time, how to swing if it's jazz (simple test: look around the joint for patting feet and smiling faces....), the original changes and keys to the tunes they say they are playing.

A verse once in a while wouldn't kill y'all MFs either, now, would it?

Edited March 27, 2009 by fasstrack

[AllenLowe]

"And the Hillcrest club was Bley's gig, not Ornette's. "

I know that. I never said otherwise. We were talking about Ornette plus piano. I've had long talks with Bley about that gig - fascinating stuff -

Edited March 27, 2009 by AllenLowe

[paul secor]

Reading fasstrack's last post, I was reminded of a passage in George E. Lewis' book, A Power Stronger than Itself, where Kalaparush is quoted:

"I would be trying to learn how to play Hank Mobley licks and stuff, right? Roscoe would say, why are you trying to play that shit for? Man, why don't you play your own music? He would get mad. He'd say, man, they done played that stuff, over and over, and they played it better than you can play it. That was just a whole new frame of reference."

Another way to see and hear things and go at them.

[fasstrack]

Reading fasstrack's last post, I was reminded of a passage in George E. Lewis' book, A Power Stronger than Itself, where Kalaparush is quoted:

"I would be trying to learn how to play Hank Mobley licks and stuff, right? Roscoe would say, why are you trying to play that shit for? Man, why don't you play your own music? He would get mad. He'd say, man, they done played that stuff, over and over, and they played it better than you can play it. That was just a whole new frame of reference."

Another way to see and hear things and go at them.

You miss my point, my good friend. It's not about copying, playing your own or someone else's licks, but being at a professional level to cut gigs, and that includes knowing tunes and how to read and please a room (read: not just being there for you), for openers. I heard Kalaparush playing on the street (where I'm heading right now, BTW). He was playing Corcovado with a beautiful tone. He knows the deal.

Why do I get so much resistance here to something so obvious to musicians like myself (the majority of us trying to, yes be creative and grow, but stay in the game)? As far as my earlier point, those of you with ears to, go out, really listen and hear how many jazz players mess up on melodies they should know in their sleep. If you can't hear it I can't help you. And I always will call 'em as I see 'em, being harder on myself than anyone.

[danasgoodstuff]

Yeah, I love my Studebaker but they ain't coming back...and I think we may see the end of widestread car ownership in our lifetimes. Analogize that any way you want...

[AllenLowe]

fasstrack I understand your point, and I know a million melodies, I play chord changes, I know where a song begins and ends - but there are other ways to do it, other kinds of professionalism. By your standard Blind Lemon Jefferson was an amateur - but there's always something somebody can't do, and pure professionalism, as you no doubt know, ain't art (or we'd all be society players). And there are other kinds of melody. But you have to allow other ways to do it - just as a free musician shouldn't put you down for what you play. Some of the alternative musicians are well schooled (eg Roswell Rudd can play anything you put in front of him) - and some just do what they do with feeling and expression. You are making the same mistake people made in the '50s when they put down Monk (and I don't care what Mary Lou Williams says, he never sounded like Teddy Wilson) -

[danasgoodstuff]

...to be less allagorical, the 'craft' thing has two sides - the functional getting/keeping a gig side and the social one-of-us side. I think as the first side has become more and more irrelvant some have reacted by clinging harder to the 2nd...

[danasgoodstuff]

...or, to look at it yet another way, fasstrack is taking the pro musician's natural point of view and the others are taking more or less the record collector's... I think the predominence of the record collector pov has had some negative effect, but that 's more in rock than jazz...

[AllenLowe]

well, no, the other point of view is more the DIY modernist POV, not the record collector's, as it's the point of view of many many "new" musicians - it is a certain kind of artist's viewpoint which puts novelty and newness and discovery above other standards - it says that art needs to ask new questions rather than give the old answers - and this viewpoint is, paradoxically, as old as bebop and Ornette, Buchner and Shakespeare -

[fasstrack]

fasstrack I understand your point, and I know a million melodies, I play chord changes, I know where a song begins and ends - but there are other ways to do it, other kinds of professionalism. By your standard Blind Lemon Jefferson was an amateur - but there's always something somebody can't do, and pure professionalism, as you no doubt know, ain't art (or we'd all be society players). And there are other kinds of melody. But you have to allow other ways to do it - just as a free musician shouldn't put you down for what you play. Some of the alternative musicians are well schooled (eg Roswell Rudd can play anything you put in front of him) - and some just do what they do with feeling and expression. You are making the same mistake people made in the '50s when they put down Monk (and I don't care what Mary Lou Williams says, he never sounded like Teddy Wilson) -

Reread what I wrote about Ornette please, if you think my statements are intolerant. I'm addressing players working in the realm of the American Song Book and jazz tunes, where I live. I don't presume to judge free players. I met Phillip Wilson after he had been in the Butterfield Blues Band, a band I considered heroes as a youth (or 'yut' to 'My Cousin Vinny'). I heard him on some records with out players I thought were comical (they were trying to be and comical is a good thing). I liked Lester Bowie's cover of 'the Great Pretender'. I think Eric Dolphy's 'Out To Lunch' one MF of a piece and would love to learn it. His playing is virtuouosic and amazing. He could play the shit out of melodies. My point was about guys working in the more traditional fields and not doing their homework, and the fact remains: there are too many fakers of melody, good in other areas, but no cigar. The hardest two things to do in my years: play a melody correctly and with good tone and keep good time. If you can't do that....Chord changes are the frame for the picture to me, and not the main event, but you have to know the right ones---the ones the composer wrote, before taking liberties, otherwise you are also a faker. How can there be any argument there? Every player (not to mention singer) I know knows this. So before you take this as a slam on the avant garde please look carefully at what I write. It's not cavelier, but carefully considered after many years of observation/participation.

Also, I don't know why you mention yourself and your mastery of melodies. I never heard you play and never uttered a peep about you. I'm sure you play quite well. Let's not take things personally here.

It ain't that serious, anyway---though we all are passionate and well-meaning. I mean there are nuclear weapons pointed at each other, fer Chrissakes.......

[Chuck Nessa]

You don't know shit about Phillip Wilson.

No reflection on anything else you said. I don't care.

Phillip was a friend since 1966 - before he was in the Butterfield band. BTW, he joined that band to feed the family.

[fasstrack]

...or, to look at it yet another way, fasstrack is taking the pro musician's natural point of view and the others are taking more or less the record collector's... I think the predominence of the record collector pov has had some negative effect, but that 's more in rock than jazz...

I have to play with these guys and we have to have standards. We all have our pet peeves. Aside from the melody fakers I can't handle 'bangers;---on piano and drums especially. They make the night longer for me.

Anyway, when I fuck up, and it's often in my book, other players would be hurting---not helping me---not to point it out.

[fasstrack]

You don't know shit about Phillip Wilson.

No reflection on anything else you said. I don't care.

Phillip was a friend since 1966 - before he was in the Butterfield band. BTW, he joined that band to feed the family.

I'm not gonna get in the mud with you. Be nice or I'll ignore you. I don't get personal with anyone here. If this isn't gonna stay civil and respectful, I got better things to do. I don't care who you knew or didn't know. Be polite to me, as I am to everyone else here and just about everyone else here, or I'll just ignore you. There's absolutely no call for that kind of comment and the terrible taste its in.....

[Chuck Nessa]

Hey fass, put that nasty post back. Kinda chicken to delete something like that.

[Chuck Nessa]

Now it is back and cleaned up. Way to go.

[fasstrack]

Hey fass, put that nasty post back. Kinda chicken to delete something like that.

OK. I see your game. Good luck picking fights with people into that. I'm not responding to this stupidity.

[AllenLowe]

don't fight boys, you're both good guys so let's just disagree - Fasstrack - I may have misunderstood, sorry, not sure if this is what you are saying but yes, there are plenty of mediocre straight-ahead players. And I will add that it is true, I always get annoyed when "outside" players think they can play straight-up gigs and than embarrass themselves (years ago I saw Dwight Andrews and Gerry Hemingway do this in the same year, same city) - these are different disciplines and yes, I consider the "free" side to require discipline - but not just discipline but understanding and viewpoint and persepective and a certain sense of humanity (hard to define this last quickly, but see Barthes on the morality of form), as in any kind of music. Another of my gripe with some of the outside players I've run into (and this is old news, as these are encounters I had in the 1980s) was a certain almost near-autistic self-centeredness. I stood on a bandstand in Hartford with Paul Flaherty about 20-some years ago, and never have I seen a more narcisstic display of me-ness. Blech. As in much of the trendy avant garde there is a great sense of personal grooviness at the expense of all alleged outsiders. Years ago my family had a friend at Antioch University who tried to commit suicide because of the isolation she felt at that hippie school, as she was not cool enough to fit in, was too different to make it there (an ultimate irony of an outsider among "outsiders" who in reality craved to be insiders). But as Francis Davis pointed out to me not too long ago, the hipster, who used to be the ultimate outsider, is now the pentultimate insider - there is something wrong with this picture -

Edited March 29, 2009 by AllenLowe

[fasstrack]

don't fight boys, you're both good guys so let's just disagree - Fasstrack - I may have misunderstood, sorry, not sure if this is what you are saying but yes, there are plenty of mediocre straight-ahead players. And I will add that it is true, I always get annoyed when "outside" players think they can play straight-up gigs and than embarrass themselves (years ago I saw Dwight Andrews and Gerry Hemingway do this in the same year, same city) - these are different disciplines and yes, I consider the "free" side to require discipline - but not just discipline but understanding and viewpoint and persepective and a certain sense of humanity (hard to define this last quickly, but see Barthes on the morality of form), as in any kind of music. Another of my gripe with some of the outside players I've run into (and this is old news, as these are encounters I had in the 1980s) was a certain almost near-autistic self-centeredness. I stood on a bandstand in Hartford with Paul Flaherty about 20-some years ago, and never have I seen a more narcisstic display of me-ness. Blech. As in much of the trendy avant garde there is a great sense of personal grooviness at the expense of all alleged outsiders. Years ago my family had a friend at Antioch University who tried to commit suicide because of the isolation she felt at that hippie school, as she was not cool enough to fit in, was too different to make it there (an ultimate irony of an outsider among "outsiders" who in reality craved to be insiders). But as Francis Davis pointed out to me not too long ago, the hipster, who used to be the ultimate outsider, is now the pentultimate insider - there is something wrong with this picture -

Narcissistic displays of me-ness cut across stylistic boundaries, and IMO possibly is one of the main reasons jazz has lost so much of its audience. Of course other factors are at play, but when one has little to begin with, kicking oneself in the ass doesn't help much.......

I actually admire free players in a way---socially if not always musically. Socially in the same way I admire the courage of women who play jazz and catch hell, or, outside of music, gays, general outsiders, people of color in this fahkaktah, prejudiced society. Anyone who gets rained on for not being mainstream gets my profound sympathy. We are intolerant and that sucks. (Though that doesn't mean that being in one of those groups gives one an instant pass, forgiveness of various transgressions, or the right to play off being a downtrodden minority. It does mean everyone should have the same chance----even if that chance is only to be visible enough to be rejected. Barry Harris used to always say about the lack of exposure of jazz in the media 'man, they don't even give people a chance not to like us.......' )

What I don't like, in music, service, anything, and don't see why I should tolerate, is incompetence. The offense is often accompanied, and worsened, by either ignorance of one's own lameness, arrogance----or worse, still, apathy about it. Everyone makes mistakes and f%%s up---and should be cut some slack for being human. When it's a way of life, and in music to me it means not knowing tunes or playing them according to Coltrane's version (rather than going to the composer---the source), suspect time that makes the night long, no ensemble skills, and---what could ever be worse---bad or non-existent listening----I say off with the heads of incompetents. I have no doubt 'out' players have their own pet peeves. They should, if they're to be taken seriously. It has nothing to do with style but everything to do with lameness.

Of course, these things never happen on my gigs. I swear.

To tie this meandering post up and get waaaay back to the original point, it's good Ornette had his champions way back when. Imagine if someone truly against the grain came on the scene now.....I would have to hope they married well...........

Finally: FWIW: put me down for hearing Bakida Carroll for the first time this past week and really digging the compositions and playing. He has a foundation and goes from there....Same for Muhal Richard Abrams. These guys are serious, not BSers like, say, Jameel Moondoc.

Edited March 30, 2009 by fasstrack

[BillF]

I've never been all that familiar with John Tynan, the Downbeat associate editor who infamously labeled the Coltrane-Dolphy group "anti-jazz" back in 1961, leading to the "Coltrane and Dolphy Answer the Critics" article. In doing some research for an upcoming Night Lights show, though, I've learned that Tynan was actually an early advocate for Ornette Coleman! (His piece "Ornette: the First Beginning" is reprinted in DOWNBEAT: 60 YEARS OF JAZZ.) While Tynan's writing is not anywhere near the level of, say, Larry Kart, he still comes across in the Ornette piece as an open-minded, sympathetic listener excited by what he's hearing (the early Ornette tunes and recordings). So why did he round on Coltrane and Dolphy so furiously? Granted, perhaps Coltrane was pursuing a more sonically aggressive path...and perhaps early Ornette was more accessible even in its own time than we've been led to think. (Though I think that's probably quite a stretch on my part, given the numerous articles I keep coming across...) Still struck me as a bit odd, though, and I'd love to hear from any who were around when said history was happening.

I was around when said history was happening, being 19 in the pivotal year of 1959 with two years of jazz listening behind me and an enthusiasm for Bird, Miles and Monk already in place. I recall that jazzers found Coltrane a good deal more accessible than Ornette, as they could hear Coltrane working record-by-record through various approaches to reach his final, perhaps most difficult style, whereas Ornette arrived fully matured, so to speak. I first heard them (not together!) in the first half of 1959 on a weekly half-hour radio show called Jamboree Jazz Time broadcast by Radio Luxembourg. The first Coltrane I heard was "Bakai" (which, curiously, I've never heard since) and which I found different, exciting and exotic, but in no way difficult or unacceptable. The following year I heard both Coltrane and Adderley playing"sheets of sound" on Milestones and complained to fellow student Jack Massarik (later to be jazz correspondent of the London Evening Standard) about Miles hiring such tasteless players. "Things have to move on, man," he wisely replied and within months I was buying and digging a copy of Giant Steps. When the classic Coltrane quartet emerged, it had a hit with "My Favorite Things" and mass appeal among jazz fans. When I first heard Ornette - and it was probably a track from Something Else - I found it unquestionably Parkerish, but thought it crazy, as if the rulebook had been thrown away. "Is this how Bird sounded in Camarillo?" I mused. But a couple of years later I was buying Ornette, starting with This Is Our Music. Perhaps more typical was a comment from a friend on the Coleman Quartet: "Fabulous rhythm section, but I wouldn't give tuppence for the other two"! I seem to recall him buying loads of the then fashionable bossa nova albums, which I suppose figures!

[fasstrack]

I've never been all that familiar with John Tynan, the Downbeat associate editor who infamously labeled the Coltrane-Dolphy group "anti-jazz" back in 1961, leading to the "Coltrane and Dolphy Answer the Critics" article. In doing some research for an upcoming Night Lights show, though, I've learned that Tynan was actually an early advocate for Ornette Coleman! (His piece "Ornette: the First Beginning" is reprinted in DOWNBEAT: 60 YEARS OF JAZZ.) While Tynan's writing is not anywhere near the level of, say, Larry Kart, he still comes across in the Ornette piece as an open-minded, sympathetic listener excited by what he's hearing (the early Ornette tunes and recordings). So why did he round on Coltrane and Dolphy so furiously? Granted, perhaps Coltrane was pursuing a more sonically aggressive path...and perhaps early Ornette was more accessible even in its own time than we've been led to think. (Though I think that's probably quite a stretch on my part, given the numerous articles I keep coming across...) Still struck me as a bit odd, though, and I'd love to hear from any who were around when said history was happening.

I was around when said history was happening, being 19 in the pivotal year of 1959 with two years of jazz listening behind me and an enthusiasm for Bird, Miles and Monk already in place. I recall that jazzers found Coltrane a good deal more accessible than Ornette, as they could hear Coltrane working record-by-record through various approaches to reach his final, perhaps most difficult style, whereas Ornette arrived fully matured, so to speak. I first heard them (not together!) in the first half of 1959 on a weekly half-hour radio show called Jamboree Jazz Time broadcast by Radio Luxembourg. The first Coltrane I heard was "Bakai" (which, curiously, I've never heard since) and which I found different, exciting and exotic, but in no way difficult or unacceptable. The following year I heard both Coltrane and Adderley playing"sheets of sound" on Milestones and complained to fellow student Jack Massarik (later to be jazz correspondent of the London Evening Standard) about Miles hiring such tasteless players. "Things have to move on, man," he wisely replied and within months I was buying and digging a copy of Giant Steps. When the classic Coltrane quartet emerged, it had a hit with "My Favorite Things" and mass appeal among jazz fans. When I first heard Ornette - and it was probably a track from Something Else - I found it unquestionably Parkerish, but thought it crazy, as if the rulebook had been thrown away. "Is this how Bird sounded in Camarillo?" I mused. But a couple of years later I was buying Ornette, starting with This Is Our Music. Perhaps more typical was a comment from a friend on the Coleman Quartet: "Fabulous rhythm section, but I wouldn't give tuppence for the other two"! I seem to recall him buying loads of the then fashionable bossa nova albums, which I suppose figures!

Tuppence?

Tuppence?