John Swana's "Philly Gumbo"

[JSngry]

it all ends up in the same place, though.

You can let your feelings change your thoughts, but not so sure if the other way works. At best, you can think yourself into maybe revisiting your feelings. And upon revisiting, you might find that your feelings have room to be refined.

But the gut gonna gut, every time.

In the end, if shit bugs you, it's just gonna bug you, period.

[Peter Friedman]

22 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

23 hours ago, JSngry said:

 

 

17 hours ago, JSngry said:

it all ends up in the same place, though.

You can let your feelings change your thoughts, but not so sure if the other way works. At best, you can think yourself into maybe revisiting your feelings. And upon revisiting, you might find that your feelings have room to be refined.

But the gut gonna gut, every time.

In the end, if shit bugs you, it's just gonna bug you, period.

There may be different ideas about the significance of my next point. I sense there is a difference between those players who get their influences from recordings, as compared to those who learn, so to speak, directly at the feet of the masters . Both Scott Hamilton and Eric Alexander, though style wise very different from each other, both played and learned alongside the generation older than themselves. 

In my view these two tenor players have a legitimacy / authenticity in their playing related to their experience of living the music next to their influences. The generation of players following EA and SH that play in those same styles lack some of that authenticity. 

[Larry Kart]

1 hour ago, Peter Friedman said:

 

There may be different ideas about the significance of my next point. I sense there is a difference between those players who get their influences from recordings, as compared to those who learn, so to speak, directly at the feet of the masters . Both Scott Hamilton and Eric Alexander, though style wise very different from each other, both played and learned alongside the generation older than themselves. 

In my view these two tenor players have a legitimacy / authenticity in their playing related to their experience of living the music next to their influences. The generation of players following EA and SH that play in those same styles lack some of that authenticity. 

Geez -- I've never given a thought to those players who have learned, or something like that, from the generation of EA and SH. Great Googly Moogly! 

Seriously, though, I think it's quite likely that younger players who dig EA and SH and others like them have the good sense or curiosity or whatever it takes to go back to the musical sources of guys like EA and SH and try to learn  what they can from them, even if it's recordings they'll be getting their info from not, from, say, George Coleman or Flip Phillips or Buddy Tate or living others of that ilk. I know I've mentioned it before in this context, but not on this thread, but it would be worthwhile for those who care about these things to find and read Jorge Luis Borges' famously mysterious and very entertaining  short story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Trust me, you won't be disappointed.

[BillF]

Of course, learning from the records is nothing new. I recall that Scott Hamilton's father's record collection was an important influence on him.

Joe Harriott told me in the 1960s that he'd learned his Charlie Parker (his major influence) from records. He never heard him live.

[Peter Friedman]

I don't discount learning from records. But up on the bandstand playing next to Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Buddy Tate, George Coleman, Art Pepper, and numerous others is a bit different. Hanging out, hearing the stories, experiencing life next to the "older" generation offers something very special.

[Larry Kart]

1 hour ago, Peter Friedman said:

I don't discount learning from records. But up on the bandstand playing next to Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Buddy Tate, George Coleman, Art Pepper, and numerous others is a bit different. Hanging out, hearing the stories, experiencing life next to the "older" generation offers something very special.

I understand where hearing Art Pepper's stories, for one, might be quite an education. I'm just saying that if, lacking the presence of living masters from the generation prior to EA snd SH, listening to recorded masters would be preferable IMO to learning from EA and SH as substitutes for masters from the generations prior to them.

 

 

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges

 

(The key part for the purposes of this discussion probably is the part toward the end about the hronir -- when one arrives at that point, and I recommend persisting, one may feel that reality has begun to dissolve.)

From Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings 1962

I

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers -- very few readers -- to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors hare something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number or men. I asked him the origin of this memorable observation and he answered that it was reproduced in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, in its article on Uqbar. The house (which we had rented furnished) had a set of this work. On the last pages of Volume XLVI we found an article on Upsala; on the first pages of Volume XLVII, one on Ural-Altaic Languages, but not a word about Uqbar. Bioy, a bit taken aback, consulted the volumes of the index. In vain he exhausted all of the imaginable spellings: Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr... Before leaving, he told me that it was a region of Iraq  or Asia Minor. I must confess that I agreed with some discomfort. I conjectured that this undocumented country and its anonymous heresiarch were a fiction devised by Bioy's modesty in order to justify a statement. The fruitless examination of one of Justus Perthes' atlases fortified my doubt.

The following day, Bioy called me from Buenos Aries. He told me he had before him the article on Uqbar, in volume XLVI of the encyclopedia. The heresiarch's name was not forthcoming, but there was a note on his doctrine, formulated in words almost identical to those he had repeated, though perhaps literarily inferior. He had recalled: Copulation and mirrors are abominable. The text of the encyclopedia said: For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe. I told him, in all truthfulness, that I should like to see that article. A few days later he brought it. This surprised me, since the scrupulous cartographical indices of Ritter's Erdkunde were plentifully ignorant of the name Uqbar.

The tome Bioy brought was, in fact, Volume XLVI of the Anglo- American Cyclopaedia. On the half-title page and the spine, the alphabetical marking (Tor-Ups) was that of our copy but, instead of 917, it contained 921 pages. These four additional pages made up the article on Uqbar, which (as the reader will have noticed) was not indicated by the alphabetical marking. We later determined that there was no other difference between the volumes. Both of them (as I believe I have indicated) are reprints of the tenth Encyclopaedia Britannica. Bioy had acquired his copy at some sale or other.

We read the article with some care. The passage recalled by Bioy was perhaps the only surprising one. The rest of it seemed very plausible, quite in keeping with the general tone of the work and (as is natural) a bit boring. Reading it over again, we discovered beneath its rigorous prose a fundamental vagueness. Of the fourteen names which figured in the geographical part, we only recognized three - Khorasan, Armenia, Erzerum - interpolated in the text in an ambiguous way. Of the historical names, only one: the impostor magician Smerdis, invoked more as a metaphor. The note seemed to fix the boundaries of Uqbar, but its nebulous reference points were rivers and craters and mountain ranges of that same region. We read, for example, that the lowlands of Tsai Khaldun and the Axa Delta marked the southern frontier and that on the islands of the delta wild horses procreate. All this, on the first part of page 918. In the historical section (page 920) we learned that as a result of the religious persecutions of the thirteenth century, the orthodox believers sought refuge on these islands, where to this day their obelisks remain and where it is not uncommon to unearth their stone mirrors. The section on Language and Literature was brief. Only one trait is worthy of recollection: it noted that the literature of Uqbar was one of fantasy and that its epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön... The bibliography enumerated four volumes which we have not yet found, though the third - Silas Haslam: History of the Land Called Uqbar, 1874 - figures in the catalogs of Bernard Quartich's book shop (1). The first, Lesbare und lesenswerthe Bemerkungen uber das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien, dates from 1641 and is the work of Johannes Valentinus Andrea. This fact is significant; a few years later, I came upon that name in the unsuspected pages of De Quincey (Writings, Volume XIII) and learned that it belonged to a German theologian who, in the early seventeenth century, described the imaginary community of Rosae Crucis - a community that others founded later, in imitation of what he had prefigured.

That night we visited the National Library. In vain we exhausted atlases, catalogs, annuals of geographical societies, travelers' and historians' memoirs: no one had ever been in Uqbar. Neither did the general index of Bioy's encyclopedia register that name. The following day, Carlos Mastronardi (to whom I had related the matter) noticed the black and gold covers of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia in a bookshop on Corrientes and Talcahuano... He entered and examined Volume XLVI. Of course, he did not find the slightest indication of Uqbar.

II

Some limited and waning memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer of the southern railways, persists in the hotel at Adrogue, amongst the effusive honeysuckles and in the illusory depths of the mirrors. In his lifetime, he suffered from unreality, as do so many Englishmen; once dead, he is not even the ghost he was then. He was tall and listless and his tired rectangular beard had once been red. I understand he was a widower, without children. Every few years he would go to England, to visit (I judge from some photographs he showed us) a sundial and a few oaks. He and my father had entered into one of those close (the adjective is excessive) English friendships that begin by excluding confidences and very soon dispense with dialog. They used to carry out an exchange of books and newspapers and engage in taciturn chess games... I remember him in the hotel corridor, with a mathematics book in his hand, sometimes looking at the irrecoverable colors of the sky. One afternoon, we spoke of the duodecimal system of numbering (in which twelve is written as 10). Ashe said that he was converting some kind of tables from the duodecimal to the sexagesimal system (in which sixty is written as 10). He added that the task had been entrusted to him by a Norwegian, in Rio Grande du Sul. We had known him for eight years and he had never mentioned a sojourn in that region... We talked of country life, of the capangas, of the Brazilian etymology of the word gaucho (which some old Uruguayans still pronounce gaucho) and nothing more was said -- may God forgive me -- of duodecimal functions. In September of 1937 (we were not at the hotel), Herbert Ashe died of a ruptured aneurysm. A few days before, he had received a sealed and certified package from Brazil. It was a book in large octavo. Ashe left it at the bar, where -- months later -- I found it. I began to leaf through it and experienced an astonished and airy feeling of vertigo which I shall not describe, for this is not the story of my emotions but of Uqbar and Tlön and Orbis Tertius. On one of the nights of Islam called the Night of Nights, the secret doors of heaven open wide and the water in the jars becomes sweeter; if those doors opened, I would not feel what I felt that afternoon. The book was written in English and contained 1001 pages. On the yellow leather back I read these curious words which were repeated on the title page: A First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Vol. XI. Hlaer to Jangr. There was no indication of date or place. On the first page and on a leaf of silk paper that covered one of the color plates there was stamped a blue oval with this inscription: Orbis Tertius. Two years before I had discovered, in a volume of a certain pirated encyclopedia, a superficial description of a nonexistent country; now chance afforded me something more precious and arduous. Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody.

In the "Eleventh Volume" which I have mentioned, there are allusions to preceding and succeeding volumes. In an article in the N. R. F. which is now classic, Nestor Ibarra has denied the existence of those companion volumes; Ezequiel Martinez Estrada and Drieu La Rochelle have refuted that doubt, perhaps victoriously. The fact is that up to now the most diligent inquiries have been fruitless. In vain we have upended the libraries of the two Americas and of Europe. Alfonso Reyes, tired of these subordinate sleuthing procedures, proposes that we should all undertake the task of reconstructing the many and weighty tomes that are lacking: ex ungue leonem. He calculates, half in earnest and half jokingly, that a generation of tlonistas should be sufficient. This venturesome computation brings us back to the fundamental problem: Who are the inventors of Tlön? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor -- an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly-- has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers... directed by an obscure man of genius. Individuals mastering these diverse disciplines are abundant, but not so those capable of inventiveness and less so those capable of subordinating that inventiveness to a rigorous and systematic plan. This plan is so vast that each writer's contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally. Let it suffice for me to recall that the apparent contradictions of the Eleventh Volume are the fundamental basis for the proof that the other volumes exist, so lucid and exact is the order observed in it. The popular magazines, with pardonable excess, have spread news of the zoology and topography of Tlön; I think its transparent tiger and towers of blood perhaps do not merit the continued attention of all men. I shall venture to request a few minutes to expound its concept of the universe.

Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language -- religion, letters, metaphysics -- all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in Tlön's conjectural Ursprache, from which the "present" languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word "moon,", but there is a verb which in English would be "to moon" or "to moonate." "The moon rose above the river" is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo, or literally: "upward behind the onstreaming it mooned."

The preceding applies to the languages of the southern hemisphere. In those of the northern hemisphere (on whose Ursprache there is very little data in the Eleventh Volume) the prime unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say "moon," but rather "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky" or any other such combination. In the example selected the mass of adjectives refers to a real object, but this is purely fortuitous. The literature of this hemisphere (like Meinong's subsistent world) abounds in ideal objects, which are convoked and dissolved in a moment, according to poetic needs. At times they are determined by mere simultaneity. There are objects composed of two terms, one of visual and another of auditory character: the color of the rising sun and the faraway cry of a bird. There are objects of many terms: the sun and the water on a swimmer's chest, the vague tremulous rose color we see with our eyes closed, the sensation of being carried along by a river and also by sleep. These second-degree objects can be combined with others; through the use of certain abbreviations, the process is practically infinite. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word. This word forms a poetic object created by the author. The fact that no one believes in the reality of nouns paradoxically causes their number to be unending. The languages of Tlön's northern hemisphere contain all the nouns of the Indo-European languages -- and many others as well.

It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time. Spinoza ascribes to his inexhaustible divinity the attributes of extension and thought; no one in Tlön would understand the juxtaposition of the first (which is typical only of certain states) and the second -- which is a perfect synonym of the cosmos. In other words, they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas.

This monism or complete idealism invalidates all science. If we explain (or judge) a fact, we connect it with another; such linking, in Tlön, is a later state of the subject which cannot affect or illuminate the previous state. Every mental state is irreducible: there mere fact of naming it --] i.e., of classifying it -- implies a falsification. From which it can be deduced that there are no sciences on Tlön, not even reasoning. The paradoxical truth is that they do exist, and in almost uncountable number. The same thing happens with philosophies as happens with nouns in the northern hemisphere. The fact that every philosophy is by definition a dialectical game, a Philosophie des Als Ob, has caused them to multiply. There is an abundance of incredible systems of pleasing design or sensational type. The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one such aspect. Even the phrase "all aspects" is rejectable, for it supposes the impossible addition of the present and of all past moments. Neither is it licit to use the plural "past moments," since it supposes another operation... One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe  -- and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives -- is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.

Amongst the doctrines of Tlön, none has merited the scandalous reception accorded to materialism. Some thinkers have formulated it with less clarity than fervor, as one might put forth a paradox. In order to facilitate the comprehension of this inconceivable thesis, a heresiarch of the eleventh century devised the sophism of the nine copper coins, whose scandalous renown is in Tlön equivalent to that of the Eleatic paradoxes. There are many versions of this "specious reasoning," which vary the number of coins and the number of discoveries; the following is the most common:

On Tuesday, X crosses a deserted road and loses nine copper coins. On Thursday, Y finds in the road four coins, somewhat rusted by Wednesday's rain. On Friday, Z discovers three coins in the road. On Friday morning, X finds two coins in the corridor of his house. The heresiarch would deduce from this story the reality - i.e., the continuity - of the nine coins which were recovered. It is absurd (he affirmed) to imagine that four of the coins have not existed between Tuesday and Thursday, three between Tuesday and Friday afternoon, two between Tuesday and Friday morning. It is logical to think that they have existed -- at least in some secret way, hidden from the comprehension of men -- at every moment of those three periods.

The language of Tlön resists the formulation of this paradox; most people did not even understand it. The defenders of common sense at first did no more than negate the veracity of the anecdote. They repeated that it was a verbal fallacy, based on the rash application of two neologisms not authorized by usage and alien to all rigorous thought: the verbs "find" and "lose," which beg the question, because they presuppose the identity of the first and of the last nine coins. They recalled that all nouns (man, coin, Thursday, Wednesday, rain) have only a metaphorical value. They denounced the treacherous circumstance "somewhat rusted by Wednesday's rain," which presupposes what is trying to be demonstrated: the persistence of the four coins from Tuesday to Thursday. They explained that equality is one thing and identity another, and formulated a kind of reductio ad absurdum: the hypothetical case of nine men who on nine nights suffer a severe pain. Would it not be ridiculous -- they questioned -- to pretend that this pain is one and the same? They said that the heresiarch was prompted only by the blasphemous intention of attributing the divine category of being to some simple coins and that at times he negated plurality and at other times did not. They argued: if equality implies identity, one would also have to admit that the nine coins are one.

Unbelievably, these refutations were not definitive. A hundred years after the problem was stated, a thinker no less brilliant than the heresiarch but of orthodox tradition formulated a very daring hypothesis. This happy conjecture affirmed that there is only one subject, that this indivisible subject is every being in the universe and that these beings are the organs and masks of the divinity. X is Y and is Z. Z discovers three coins because he remembers that X lost them; X finds two in the corridor because he remembers that the others have been found... The Eleventh Volume suggests that three prime reasons determined the complete victory of this idealist pantheism. The first, its repudiation of solipsism; the second, the possibility of preserving the psychological basis of the sciences; the third, the possibility of preserving the cult of the gods. Schopenhauer (the passionate and lucid Schopenhauer) formulates a very similar doctrine in the first volume of Parerga und Paralipomena.

The geometry of Tlön comprises two somewhat different disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our own geometry and is subordinated to the first. The basis of visual geometry is the surface, not the point. This geometry disregards parallel lines and declares that man in his movement modifies the forms which surround him. The basis of its arithmetic is the notion of indefinite numbers. They emphasize the importance of the concepts of greater and lesser, which our mathematicians symbolize as > and <. They maintain that the operation of counting modifies the quantities and converts them from indefinite into definite sums. The fact that several individuals who count the same quantity would obtain the same result is, for the psychologists, an example of association of ideas or of a good exercise of memory. We already know that in Tlön the subject of knowledge is one and eternal.

In literary practices the idea of a single subject is also all-powerful. It is uncommon for books to be signed. The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous. The critics often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say -- attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres...

Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete.

Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality. In the most ancient regions of Tlön, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent. Two persons look for a pencil; the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to his expectations. These secondary objects are called hronir and are, though awkward in form, somewhat longer. Until recently, the Hronir were the accidental products of distraction and forgetfulness. It seems unbelievable that their methodical production dates back scarcely a hundred years, but this is what the Eleventh Volume tells us. The first efforts were unsuccessful. However, the modus operandi merits description. The director of one of the state prisons told his inmates that there were certain tombs in an ancient river bed and promised freedom to whoever might make an important discovery. During the months preceding the excavation the inmates were shown photographs of what they were to find. This first effort proved that expectation and anxiety can be inhibitory; a week's work with pick and shovel did not mange to unearth anything in the way of a hron except a rusty wheel of a period posterior to the experiment. But this was kept in secret and the process was repeated later in four schools. In three of them failure was almost complete; in a fourth (whose director died accidentally during the first excavations) the students unearthed -- or produced -- a gold mask, an archaic sword, two or three clay urns and the moldy and mutilated torso of a king whose chest bore an inscription which it has not yet been possible to decipher. Thus was discovered the unreliability of witnesses who knew of the experimental nature of the search... Mass investigations produce contradictory objects; now individual and almost improvised jobs are preferred. The methodical fabrication of hronir (says the Eleventh Volume) has performed prodigious services for archaeologists. It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile than the future. Curiously, the hronir of second and third degree -- the hronir derived from another hron, those derived from the hron of a hron -- exaggerate the aberrations of the initial one; those of fifth degree are almost uniform; those of ninth degree become confused with those of the second; in those of the eleventh there is a purity of line not found in the original. The process is cyclical: the hron of the twelfth degree begins to fall off in quality. Stranger and more pure than any hron is, at times, the ur: the object produced through suggestion, educed by hope. The great golden mask I have mentioned is an illustrious example.

Things became duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.

Postscript (1947). I reproduce the preceding article just as it appeared in the Anthology of Fantastic Literature (1940), with no omission other than that o f a few metaphors and a kind of sarcastic summary which now seems frivolous. So many things have happened since then... I shall do no more than recall them here.

In March of 1941 a letter written by Gunnary Erfjord was discovered in a book by Hinton which had belonged to Herbert Ashe. The envelope bore a cancellation from Ouro Preto; the letter completely elucidated the mystery of Tlön. Its text corroborated the hypotheses of Martinez Estrada. One night in Lucerne or in London, in the early seventeenth century, the splendid history has its beginning. A secret and benevolent society (amongst whose members were Dalgarno and later George Berkeley) arose to invent a country. Its vague initial program included "hermetic studies," philanthropy and the cabala. From this first period dates the curious book by Andrea. After a few years of secret conclaves and premature syntheses it was understood that one generation was not sufficient to give articulate form to a country. They resolved that each of the masters should elect a disciple who would continue his work. This hereditary arrangement prevailed; after an interval of two centuries the persecuted fraternity sprang up again in America. In 1824, in Memphis (Tennessee), one of its affiliates conferred with the ascetic millionaire Ezra Buckley. The latter, somewhat disdainfully, let him speak -- and laughed at the plan's modest scope. He told the agent that in America it was absurd to invent a country and proposed the invention of a planet. To this gigantic idea he added another, a product of his nihilism: that of keeping the enormous enterprise a secret. At that time the twenty volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were circulating in the United States; Buckley suggested that a methodical encyclopedia of the imaginary planet be written. He was to leave them his mountains of gold, his navigable rivers, his pasture lands roamed by cattle and buffalo, his Negroes, his brothels and his dollars, on one condition: "The work will make no pact with the impostor Jesus Christ." Buckley did not believe in God, but he wanted to demonstrate to this nonexistent God that mortal man was capable of conceiving a world. Buckley was poisoned in Baton Rouge in 1828; in 1914 the society delivered to its collaborators, some three hundred in number, the last volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. The edition was a secret one; its forty volumes (the vastest undertaking ever carried out by man) would be the basis for another more detailed edition, written not in English but in one of the languages of Tlön. This revision of an illusory world, was called, provisionally, Orbis Tertius and one of its modest demiurgi was Herbert Ashe, whether as an agent of Gunnar Erfjord or as an affiliate, I do not know. His having received a copy of the Eleventh Volume would seem to favor the latter assumption. But what about the others?

In 1942 events became more intense. I recall one of the first of these with particular clarity and it seems that I perceived then something of its premonitory character. It happened in an apartment on Laprida Street, facing a high and light balcony which looked out toward the sunset. Princess Faucigny Lucinge had received her silverware from Pointiers. From the vast depths of a box embellished with foreign stamps, delicate immobile objects emerged: silver from Utrecht and Paris covered with hard heraldic fauna, and a samovar. Amongst them -- with the perceptible and tenuous tremor of a sleeping bird -- a compass vibrated mysteriously. The princess did not recognize it. Its blue needle longed for magnetic north; its metal case was concave in shape; the letters around its edge corresponded to one of the alphabets of Tlön. Such was the first intrusion of this fantastic world into the world of reality.

I am still troubled by the stroke of chance which made me witness of the second intrusion as well. It happened some months later, at a country store owned by a Brazilian in Cuchilla Negra. Amorim and I were returning from Sant' Anna. The River Tacuarembo had flooded and we were obliged to sample (and endure) the proprietor's rudimentary hospitality. He provided us with some creaking cots in a large room cluttered with barrels and hides. We went to bed, but were kept from sleeping until dawn by the drunken ravings of an unseen neighbor, who intermingled inextricable insults with snatches of milongas -- or rather with snatches of the same milonga. As might be supposed, we attributed this insistent uproar to the store owner's fiery cane liquor. By daybreak,the man was dead in the hallway. The roughness of his voice had deceived us: he was only a youth. In his delirium a few coins had fallen from his belt, along with a cone of bright metal, the size of a die. In vain a boy tried to pick up this cone. A man was scarcely able to raise it from the ground. I held it in my hand for a few minutes; I remember that its weight was intolerable and that after it was removed, the feeling of oppressiveness remained. I also remember the exact circle it pressed into my palm. The sensation of a very small and at the same time extremely heavy object produced a disagreeable impression of repugnance and fear. One of the local men suggested we throw it into the swollen river; Amorim acquired it for a few pesos. No one knew anything about the dead man, except that "he came from the border." These small, very heavy cones (made from a metal which is not of this world) are images of the divinity in certain regions of Tlön.

Here I bring the personal part of my narrative to a close. The rest is in the memory (if not in the hopes or fears) of all my readers. Let it suffice for me to recall or mention the following facts, with a mere brevity of words which the reflective recollection of all will enrich or amplify. Around 1944, a person doing research fro the newspaper The American (of Nashville, Tennessee) brought to light in a Memphis library the forty volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Even today there is a controversy over whether this discovery was accidental or whether it was permitted by the directors of the still nebulous Orbis Tertius. The latter is most likely. Some of the incredible aspects of the Eleventh Volume (for example, the multiplication of the hronir) have been eliminated or attenuated in the Memphis copies; it is reasonable to imagine that these omissions follow the plan of exhibiting a world which is not too incompatible with the real world. The dissemination of objects from Tlön over different countries would complement this plan...  The fact is that the international press infinitely proclaimed the "find." Manuals, anthologies, summaries, literal versions, authorized re-editions and pirated editions of the Greatest Work of Man flooded and still flood the earth. Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account.

The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a resemblance of order -- dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism -- was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet? It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws -- I translate: inhuman laws -- which we never quite grasp. Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty -- not even  that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars... A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.

Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.

Notes:

1 Haslam has also published A General History of Labyrinths.

2 Russell (The Analuysis of Mind, 1921, page 159) supposes that the planet has been created a few minutes ago, furnished with a humanity that "remembers" an illusory past.

3 A century, according to the duodecimal system, signifies a period of a hundred and forty-four years.

4 Today, one of the churches of Tlön Platonically maintains that a certain pain, a certain greenish tint of yellow, a certain temperature, a certain sound, are the only reality. All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.

5 There remains, of course, the problem of the material of some objects.

 

[Peter Friedman]

We agree. I think you may have misinterpeted one of my previous posts, or I was not as clear as I meant to be.

My main point though was that as a very young musician, the opportunity to play with and hang out with masters of a previous generation is apt to rub off in a positive way. Many, perhaps most go todays younger up and coming musicians lack that same opportunity.  

 

 

[BillF]

17 minutes ago, Peter Friedman said:

We agree. I think you may have misinterpeted one of my previous posts, or I was not as clear as I meant to be.

My main point though was that as a very young musician, the opportunity to play with and hang out with masters of a previous generation is apt to rub off in a positive way. Many, perhaps most go todays younger up and coming musicians lack that same opportunity.  

 

 

Agreed, not to mention the musical education of playing in big bands and/or rhythm and blues outfits which was the experience of so many great jazz musicians of the past.

Playing jazz has moved, like so many other skills, from learning on the job to doing a course at college.

Edited August 31, 2020 by BillF

[Larry Kart]

2 hours ago, Peter Friedman said:

We agree. I think you may have misinterpeted one of my previous posts, or I was not as clear as I meant to be.

My main point though was that as a very young musician, the opportunity to play with and hang out with masters of a previous generation is apt to rub off in a positive way. Many, perhaps most go todays younger up and coming musicians lack that same opportunity.  

 

 

Where I got confused about what you said is that while EA certainly had an abundant opportunity to learn from a master, George Coleman, his playing IMO shows little or no sign that he has learned much other than to play quite a bit like him. With whom, if anyone,  SH had a specific disciple-mentor relationship, a la EA's with Coleman, I don't know, and I'll also back off some on saying of SH what I said of EA because I have at times heard SH play with IMO genuine personality and "voice" (to use Jim S. adept term), although, again IMO, the way SH goes in and out of focus in that respect in that concert clip with Jan Lundgren, gives me an uneasy feeling. 

BTW one aspect of SH's history that may be relevant to what we're talking about -- when he first came on the scene there were a number of older so-called Mainstream players of all instruments, not just tenor men, who were recording and working fairly frequently, and these guys understandably welcomed and embraced SH like a long-lost brother, as though here at last was evidence that their way of playing was not just for players of their vintage but would have new life in the hands of youngsters such as SH. He was not the only such figure -- Randy Sandke to some extent was another (though Randy was quite aware that there were equivocal aspects to this embrace; it was good for job security [getting gigs in/of that style], but it typecast him stylistically in an at times unwelcome manner and made it difficult for his quite striking more "advanced" music to get much of a hearing). In any case, SH was on the receiving end of such an embrace -- by an older generation of players and by audiences who enjoyed that style of music, and it was my impression that for a fair bit of time SH found that embrace too comfortable; it didn't necessarily further his personal  musical development to keep playing the good old tunes in that good old style. (Admittedly, SH didn't have much if any of Sandke's "advanced" musical impulses; I would guess that everything SH liked to play/felt comfortable playing he was playing at that time. But see below.)

I'm not saying that those Mainstream tunes and that style weren't/aren't good, but that for, say, Buddy Tate to remain in that groove at age 70 or so was not the same thing in terms of each man's growth and development  as SH remaining in that groove at age 3O.  That is, back then Buddy was all grown up (say, wholly mature)  and still capable of playing his ass off, while the young SH was not yet all grown up but playing in a manner that implied that he was -- both in terms of how he was being received by his older musical colleagues and by the audiences they typically  played for. I'll have to listen to that Mulligan-SH album again, but  I would guess that the reason it sparked SH's individuality as much as I  recall it did was that the chunk of jazz history that Jeru embodied and brought with him was at once quite  amenable and fresh to SH but not as comfortable as yet another trip  on the "920 Special"would have been.

[Larry Kart]

To change the mood, on his "Bright Moments" album Swana plays a stunning solo on his tune "Ferris Wheel."

[Peter Friedman]

Larry, where I differ from your comments on SH is that as an "old" jazz fan, I appreciate that there is a very good tenor player who did not succumbed to the Coltrane, Rollins, etc. style of playing. No long strings of 8th notes, but a great appreciation and comfort in the style of the earlier masters such as Prez, Ben Webster, Bean and Al & Zoot.

Yes, I can and do play the records by those Masters, but find it very satisfying to know that that style did not fade away when those elder Masters died. Hearing players continue those  traditions does not cause me to view the musicians as lacking growth and maturity. Rather I believe that there are musicians such as SH that love those earlier styles and I for one would rather hear Scott Hamilton than most tenor players active today. 

This probably says more about me and my somewhat "conservative" jazz taste, than about anything else. To be able to play records by tenor players such as Bud Freeman, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Sonny Rollins,  "Early" Coltrane,"Early" Bill Perkins, Grant Stewart, and Scott Hamilton, offers me a wide range of musical enjoyment. 

Bill Perkins is perhaps a relevant case to mention. When his tenor playing "grew and matured", the enjoyment I received from his playing greatly declined. Perkins, in my opinion, was at his best when he followed in the path set by Lester Young. At some point, he must have felt he needed to "advance" and grow and move into what was the musical present at that time. Perkins decided to follow the direction set by players such as Rollins and Coltrane.. To my ears he was not successful playing in that "newer" style. 

 

 

[Larry Kart]

At age 78 and as an experienced fan of all eras from Morton to Evan Parker, with perhaps a few blindspots I too love a great many "pre-modern," so to speak, tenor men. The question I have when I encounter a younger player who has not "succumbed" "to the Coltrane, Rollins, etc. style of playing" (that "succumbed" is interesting, like it's a disease?) is does this younger pl/ayer have, again using Jim Sangrey's apt term, a genuine "voice" -- as much so as say Al Cohn or Ben Webster had, and what is the nature of this younger player's history/evolution and likely development. If he doesn't have or show signs of developing the degree of voice that Buddy Tate or Brew Moore or Ike Quebec  or Buddy Collette of Frank Wess had (that list is virtually endless, except when Father Time's scythe strikes), I'm not that interested. And for sure I can get very pissy when I run across one of those younger wannabes (e.g. Harry Allen) who seems to me to be wearing stylistic Halloween Masks.On the other hand -- and I think we both have our favorites --I find Grant Stewart to be a very satisfying figure of much promise; his best work, and there's a lot of it IMO, moves me just as much as Al Cohn's does. So what, taking a step back here, is going on?

I mentioned Al Cohn; you mentioned Bill Perkins. I share your declining interests in latter day Perkins, but I think it's important not just to turn one's back on latter-day Perkions out of distaste or boredom  but to scope out the how and why of what went on there. Principles, one might say, are involved. Place Bill alongside his old running buddy, the sadly departed Richie Kamuca, and as close as they once were, over time we get two rather diffiffrent but not unrelated stories. Richie c. 1959-60 began to, so to speak "toughen up" his approach a good deal -- both in terms of tone/timbre and rhythmic and harmonic obliqueness. For me, this worked like a charm until Richie's too early death, mostly because, as several of Richie's Later recordings on alto would demonstrate, there had always been a whole lot of Bird, as well as Press of course,  at the base of Richie's music. 

Perkins though, as borne out in a long interview he did with Cadence, in the '60s began to engage in a fairly self-conscious drive to toughen his music up in terms of timbre, harmonic and rhythmic obliqueness, this to some degree along the lines of  a Rollins and Coltrane and Shorter driven racial-stylistic uneasiness. Bill, one might say, wanted to be more hip; he was fairly open about this. In practical musical-emotional terms, the problem he had was that unlike Richie, the rhythmic base of his playing was still Pres-derived -- adding Rollins and Coltrane and Shorter-derived gestures on top of this led at times to a certain "these parts don't match up"  queasiness. Further,  what Bill did, in a mostly uncalculated manner, was boost the harmonic obliqueness of his lines quite a bit -- as though such an increase in meaningful harmonic obliqueness would quite naturally lead to a similar increase in meaningful rhythmic obliqueness. Well, not so fast; sometimes it did, sometimes not so much. But Bill's "quest," if that's how to put it, was for me always interesting and also kind of moving, in a somewhat poignant, if at times musically unsatisfying manner. And in a revealing manner too -- it's not often that a major player tries to transform himself along such radical lines and in broad daylight too and also explains why he did so to boot.

 

Now Al Cohn changed a whole lot from the mid-1950s to the end, and I love his work from all periods. But the journey to Al's final immensely forceful days was, so it seems, pretty much a just happened process for him, not at all like Perkins' in part motivated by anxiety journey. Al, I would guess never had a thought about how hip his playing was or wasn't, He picked up the horn, and one got out of the way.

So this is an example of how I tend to look at these kinds of  things. My information may be dubious at times, my guesswork may be flawed, but looking at the music and its players only in terms of what makes me and them feel more or less "comfortable," is to me -- I don't know -- kind of unserious; it's just not the way I ride. As the title of the late Val Wiimer's book put it, this music is as serious as your life.

[JSngry]

That record that Bill Perkins and James Clay made together is great!

Sometimes people just get curious and see where it takes them. Not just musicians, people.

[Larry Kart]

Don't know that one; I'll look for it. But you do know that Cadence interview with Perkins, right? Reading that there's not much question about what lay behind Bill's fairly willful changes in his style. BTW, I find the several albums where Perkins is paired with Lennie Niehaus very interesting re: what we've been talking about. Lennie, always something of a oneoff stylistically, with a lot of "advanced"obliqueness of all kinds (like a cross between Hindemith and Krenek) build right into, or resting right alongside, a certain rhythmic and melodic "squareness" -- as though his lines were just about to break into a reprise of "Skip-To-My-Lou" or some such -- was a striking partner for latter-day Perkins. Coming at their personal musical shebangs from fairly different places as they did, they often ended up in about the same place -- particularly so when they improvised simultaneously, as they often did. In effect, I think that the quality and authority of Lennie's playing, not to mention his material success in Hollywood, gave Perkins a good-sized emotional boost.

[Larry Kart]

Jim: I'll take your word for it that Perkins and Clay made for a fine pairing at that point in Bill's more or less willed evolution. My point is, or might be, that Clay's evolution and where he ended up being at that point in his career was not particularly willed but more or less inevitable. Many roads lead to the Emerald City, bit I think their two roads were different in kind, no matter that they eventually matched up well.

 

It goes for $50. Maybe I'll just listen.

[Peter Friedman]

1 hour ago, Larry Kart said:

At age 78 and as an experienced fan of all eras from Morton to Evan Parker, with perhaps a few blindspots I too love a great many "pre-modern," so to speak, tenor men. The question I have when I encounter a younger player who has not "succumbed" "to the Coltrane, Rollins, etc. style of playing" (that "succumbed" is interesting, like it's a disease?) is does this younger pl/ayer have, again using Jim Sangrey's apt term, a genuine "voice" -- as much so as say Al Cohn or Ben Webster had, and what is the nature of this younger player's history/evolution and likely development. If he doesn't have or show signs of developing the degree of voice that Buddy Tate or Brew Moore or Ike Quebec  or Buddy Collette of Frank Wess had (that list is virtually endless, except when Father Time's scythe strikes), I'm not that interested. And for sure I can get very pissy when I run across one of those younger wannabes (e.g. Harry Allen) who seems to me to be wearing stylistic Halloween Masks.On the other hand -- and I think we both have our favorites --I find Grant Stewart to be a very satisfying figure of much promise; his best work, and there's a lot of it IMO, moves me just as much as Al Cohn's does. So what, taking a step back here, is going on?

I mentioned Al Cohn; you mentioned Bill Perkins. I share your declining interests in latter day Perkins, but I think it's important not just to turn one's back on latter-day Perkions out of distaste or boredom  but to scope out the how and why of what went on there. Principles, one might say, are involved. Place Bill alongside his old running buddy, the sadly departed Richie Kamuca, and as close as they once were, over time we get two rather diffiffrent but not unrelated stories. Richie c. 1959-60 began to, so to speak "toughen up" his approach a good deal -- both in terms of tone/timbre and rhythmic and harmonic obliqueness. For me, this worked like a charm until Richie's too early death, mostly because, as several of Richie's Later recordings on alto would demonstrate, there had always been a whole lot of Bird, as well as Press of course,  at the base of Richie's music. 

Perkins though, as borne out in a long interview he did with Cadence, in the '60s began to engage in a fairly self-conscious drive to toughen his music up in terms of timbre, harmonic and rhythmic obliqueness, this to some degree along the lines of  a Rollins and Coltrane and Shorter driven racial-stylistic uneasiness. Bill, one might say, wanted to be more hip; he was fairly open about this. In practical musical-emotional terms, the problem he had was that unlike Richie, the rhythmic base of his playing was still Pres-derived -- adding Rollins and Coltrane and Shorter-derived gestures on top of this led at times to a certain "these parts don't match up"  queasiness. Further,  what Bill did, in a mostly uncalculated manner, was boost the harmonic obliqueness of his lines quite a bit -- as though such an increase in meaningful harmonic obliqueness would quite naturally lead to a similar increase in meaningful rhythmic obliqueness. Well, not so fast; sometimes it did, sometimes not so much. But Bill's "quest," if that's how to put it, was for me always interesting and also kind of moving, in a somewhat poignant, if at times musically unsatisfying manner. And in a revealing manner too -- it's not often that a major player tries to transform himself along such radical lines and in broad daylight too and also explains why he did so to boot.

 

Now Al Cohn changed a whole lot from the mid-1950s to the end, and I love his work from all periods. But the journey to Al's final immensely forceful days was, so it seems, pretty much a just happened process for him, not at all like Perkins' in part motivated by anxiety journey. Al, I would guess never had a thought about how hip his playing was or wasn't, He picked up the horn, and one got out of the way.

So this is an example of how I tend to look at these kinds of  things. My information may be dubious at times, my guesswork may be flawed, but looking at the music and its players only in terms of what makes me and them feel more or less "comfortable," is to me -- I don't know -- kind of unserious; it's just not the way I ride. As the title of the late Val Wiimer's book put it, this music is as serious as your life.

Larry, I find your thoughts here highly interesting. I too read , though long ago, the Perkins interview in Cadence. We are in agreement on Al Cohn too. My view on Kamuca is pretty much the same as what you said about Al Cohn. I love his playing throughout his career.

The Bill Perkins with Lennie Niehaus dates are, to my taste, partially successful. There are portions I like, and some are for me just OK. Are you familiar with the Fresh Sound CD titled Perk Plays Prez? It has Jan Lundgren, Dave Carpenter and Paul Kreibich. This is from 1995  and Perkins reverts (maybe that is not the best term?) to his earlier style. Though not great, in my opinion, I do enjoy hearing him, once again, play in that Lester Young style.

I also find it interesting that after changing his style on tenor, I found Perkins baritone sax playing very good, and without that Coltrane, Rollins problem I hear in most of his later tenor playing.  The CD - Bill Perkins & Frank Strazzeri - Warm Moods on Fresh Sound  has Perkins playing Baritone sax on 9 tracks, bass clarinet on 2 tracks, and clarinet on 1 track. I like it quite a bit.

Larry, you mentioned being 78 years old, so I decided to mention that I am 83 years old and have been listening to jazz since I was about 15 years old. 

 

[HutchFan]

4 hours ago, Peter Friedman said:

Bill Perkins is perhaps a relevant case to mention. When his tenor playing "grew and matured", the enjoyment I received from his playing greatly declined. Perkins, in my opinion, was at his best when he followed in the path set by Lester Young. At some point, he must have felt he needed to "advance" and grow and move into what was the musical present at that time. Perkins decided to follow the direction set by players such as Rollins and Coltrane.. To my ears he was not successful playing in that "newer" style. 

I've heard the same said about Harold Land and evolution of his style.  Ironically but perhaps not coincidentally, I prefer Land's later, less bop-oriented style.  Peter, I'd bet a dollar that you prefer the earlier. 

And that's probably just a manifestation our predilections, preferences, and built-in assumptions about what constitutes good music.  Of course, the information, the background, the context, the knowledge that we're carrying around in our heads -- all of that "consciousness stuff" -- may be more or less sophisticated, more or less informed.  And hopefully it's continually shifting and evolving and not hardening into some that gets ossified -- but, at the end of the day, there is something in us that says, "I really like that music. It works for me."  Or we don't.  ...  On top of that, we might be able to articulate why we prefer (or don't prefer) a given musician -- like the conversation that I've been following here -- but at the end of the day it comes down to non-objective things that tell as much about the listener as they do the musician. 

Then again, perhaps that's easy for me to say -- if only because I am neither a musician nor a critic!

I've only jumped on the bandwagon to hear some good music.  I'm just along for the ride.  

 

[JSngry]

I like Perkins on the Billy Higgins Bridgework record too. Dandy!

I well remember that Perkins Cadence interview, but it just seemed to me to read that at some point he found something lacking in his own playing, it just wasn't satisfying him as much as it used to to do tht. So, you know, he started looking around, and then proceeded accordingly.

To read too much more into it than the guy just started wanting something more/different/else, I don't think there's any place to go with it past that. Some people are content being content, some people move around a few times over the course of their lives. The only really "bad" answer is to want one but do the other.

[Dan Gould]

22 minutes ago, JSngry said:

I like Perkins on the Billy Higgins Bridgework record too. Dandy!

 

Glad to hear you've listened but that's Harold Land on the tracks that don't have Clay.

[JSngry]

Well then, somewhere on latter-day Contemporary there's Bill Perkins playing in his "latter day" style that is a stone gas! Maybe it was a Bud Shank record.

I think he's a hoot, because he still sounds like bill Perkins, just like a bill Perkins who had went around the world a few times and came back with a braoder perspective than he had when he left.

And then...there's some totally off0-the-wall obscure indie-produced record by some dummer(?)  htat's all Mingus compositions only played like in an extreme Giuffre chill-chamber style, Perkins is all up in htat, playing very, VERY deeply, but not at all like his 50s style.

I think Bill Perkins was probably a pretty deep guy from jump and no doubt went therough some changes along the way. but I dig the guy's tenor playing, always.

[Dan Gould]

Serious Swingers would be the only possibility, per discogs.

[JSngry]

Then that would have been it then.

[Peter Friedman]

3 hours ago, HutchFan said:

I've heard the same said about Harold Land and evolution of his style.  Ironically but perhaps not coincidentally, I prefer Land's later, less bop-oriented style.  Peter, I'd bet a dollar that you prefer the earlier. 

And that's probably just a manifestation our predilections, preferences, and built-in assumptions about what constitutes good music.  Of course, the information, the background, the context, the knowledge that we're carrying around in our heads -- all of that "consciousness stuff" -- may be more or less sophisticated, more or less informed.  And hopefully it's continually shifting and evolving and not hardening into some that gets ossified -- but, at the end of the day, there is something in us that says, "I really like that music. It works for me."  Or we don't.  ...  On top of that, we might be able to articulate why we prefer (or don't prefer) a given musician -- like the conversation that I've been following here -- but at the end of the day it comes down to non-objective things that tell as much about the listener as they do the musician. 

Then again, perhaps that's easy for me to say -- if only because I am neither a musician nor a critic!

I've only jumped on the bandwagon to hear some good music.  I'm just along for the ride.  

 

Hutchfan, you should have bet a lot more than a dollar because you were correct. I much prefer the early Harold Land. These recordings on Contemporary are examples of some of my favorite playing by Land.

The Curtis Counce Group Vol.1 - Landslide

You Get More Bounce With Curtis Counce

Harold In The Land of Jazz

Hampton Hawes - - For Real

 

[Larry Kart]

6 hours ago, Peter Friedman said:

Larry, I find your thoughts here highly interesting. I too read , though long ago, the Perkins interview in Cadence. We are in agreement on Al Cohn too. My view on Kamuca is pretty much the same as what you said about Al Cohn. I love his playing throughout his career.

The Bill Perkins with Lennie Niehaus dates are, to my taste, partially successful. There are portions I like, and some are for me just OK. Are you familiar with the Fresh Sound CD titled Perk Plays Prez? It has Jan Lundgren, Dave Carpenter and Paul Kreibich. This is from 1995  and Perkins reverts (maybe that is not the best term?) to his earlier style. Though not great, in my opinion, I do enjoy hearing him, once again, play in that Lester Young style.

I also find it interesting that after changing his style on tenor, I found Perkins baritone sax playing very good, and without that Coltrane, Rollins problem I hear in most of his later tenor playing.  The CD - Bill Perkins & Frank Strazzeri - Warm Moods on Fresh Sound  has Perkins playing Baritone sax on 9 tracks, bass clarinet on 2 tracks, and clarinet on 1 track. I like it quite a bit.

Larry, you mentioned being 78 years old, so I decided to mention that I am 83 years old and have been listening to jazz since I was about 15 years old. 

 

I found the most Pres-like latter day Perkins on the album of mostly ballads he did with that Netherlands orchestra that Rob Pronk leads. Don't recall listening to "Perk Plays Pres."

[JSngry]

"Pres-like" Perkins...yeah, whatever.

How about Perkins-like Perkins, there THAT is.