Face of the Bass

Again, I'd really encourage people to read Family Properties, which deals directly with this stuff. You know, actual research, as opposed to people just pulling stuff out of their asses. http://www.amazon.com/Family-Properties-Struggle-Transformed-Chicago/dp/0805091424

There is a good book on the real estate markets in Chicago in the mid-twentieth century that deals with the relationships between Jews and African-Americans in a way that is nuanced and more helpful than that implied by most broader classifications. It is called Family Properties, and is written by Beryl Satter. One thing to understand about the relationships between Jews and blacks in the U.S. is that many urban neighborhoods that became black in the mid twentieth century were, prior to that, often Jewish and/or containing other white immigrant communities. So there is a kind of hierarchy at work, or rather perhaps a continuum, that occasionally put Jews and blacks into close contact with one another, and in relationships that were often antagonistic and economically exploitative (as happened in the buying and selling of real estate). I think one of the things Satter suggests is that the only partial integration of Jews into the mainstream of American life during the twentieth century often meant that upwardly mobile Jewish people played unsavory economic roles that encouraged anti-Semitism among blacks.

Berry set is gone.

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I think his music was a bit more political than that, not in an overly-reductive way, but it's there. I think free jazz is the most vibrant sub-genre of jazz that ever existed. The free jazz movement is now 50 years old, basically half the life of all of recorded jazz. While much of it fizzled in the 1970s, I think Leeway is right that it reemerged in other contexts, and can still be heard in the American context in the music of, for instance, William Parker. Without the post-Ornette musical legacy, jazz would be pretty boring, IMO. Economically perhaps it hurt the music, but in terms of extending the vitality of the genre, I think it played a very important role in keeping jazz culturally relevant after the emergence of rock and roll.

Oh, he does give plenty of love to Coltrane. He says at one point that Coltrane was basically finishing off the song form in jazz, and that Coleman and others like him were picking up where Trane was ending.

I've been reading Baraka/Jones's Black Music this week and I think in those essays, mainly from the early 1960s, his critique of hard bop comes through rather clearly. He compares it to the swing music of the 1930s, in that the hard bop movement represents a mainstreaming of its more revolutionary predecessor (in the case of swing, that would be the music of the 1920s; obviously in the case of hard bop, that's the bebop revolution). He argues that this mainstreaming, with regard to hard bop, leads to a formulaic smoothing of the music's jagged edges. In the early 1960s he was arguing that the just-emerging free jazz of people like Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry and so forth was in a sense a rejection of hard bop and a return to the revolutionary rhythmic potential of bebop. FWIW, there's a lot about his analysis that I agree with. One thing I find interesting, reading his stuff from the early 1960s, was his sense that Sonny Rollins was going to be central to the development of free jazz. Certainly there are elements there in the music, but I think that Rollins's subsequent recorded output probably would have been regarded by Jones as something of a letdown. Reading these essays has reminded me that, for my money, he's one of the best jazz critics ever and a great essayist. I've never been able to enjoy the poetry as much as I do his prose, but I'll give it another try at some point.

One of the reasons I got into academia was to improve the writing. There are absolutely ways to write about complex cultural phenomena with language that can be understood and appreciated by the educated layperson. I often think that the off-putting formulations of some academics are simply a function of not understanding how to write well. Also, to the point earlier that this academic discourse insults jazz, I would add that it insults just about everything that it tries to cover. Seeing the lives of ordinary people reduced in this way is actually even more offensive than what some writers try to do with Trane. I started reading the edited volume on Black America's Quest for Freedom and gave up on it partway through. My recollection is that there were a few nice essays but also a lot of stuff that was really third-rate.

Oh man, I'm all over this. I love this period of McPhee's career.

Bump, with further price reductions on the Farlow and on the Ellington.

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Bump with a price reduction on the Farlow set. Thanks for looking!

Yeah, the problem is that those ruminations on culture are not that special or insightful. Seriously, I know a lot about American cultural history and the sections on, say, D.W. Griffith and Birth of a Nation were pretty par for the course.

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Not sure if this is the best forum for this request, but I'm looking for a reasonably-priced copy of the OOP set on Hip-o-select, Little Walter: The Complete Chess Masters. If you have a copy that you are willing to part with, I can offer many things in trade. Please pm if interested.

I'm just amazed that somebody could claim to be working on a biography for this many decades and then produce something that, with the exception of the included interviews, could have been written in a couple months. It's not necessarily that it's bad, it's that a definitive biography of Parker should not spend much space regurgitating things like Birth of a Nation or Jack Johnson.

Yeah, as I kept reading this my opinion kept going down. It kind of feels like an essay that's been excessively padded, and his writing on American culture is really quite inane after awhile. It's a big disappointment.

So far there's nothing full of shit or wrong about it. It's actually kind of standard and predictable. For instance he spends a few pages talking about Birth of a Nation even though it came out before Parker was born. I think he was trying to make a point about blackface in American culture, but it kind of fell flat and was an unnecessary diversion.

He talked about this in his interview with Ratliff and it's the part that I found interesting. he said he wanted to put Bird more in the context of his time to make him more of a "real" person to the readers. Anyway, I am going to read it. Yeah, but the challenge in doing that is to connect all that stuff to Parker's world. And at times it feels like he's just trying to fill up space and doesn't have a clear reason to go into his digressions.

I'm almost 100 pages in. My main criticism so far is that Crouch spends a lot of time on broader American cultural history, which is interesting in its own right but seems to have only the most tenuous connection to Parker. I'm starting to think that this didn't need to be two volumes. But overall it's a good book. The interviews he does with Parker's family and associates are fantastic.

I think it's weird the way people are always giving Blue Train a hard time.

After reading the first chapter last night, I'll be very surprised if it turns out that Crouch has simply used Parker's life as a platform for advancing his own agendas. I haven't seen that so far.

My field is African history, and this is a field that has had to construct knowledge about the continent's past often without the kinds of evidence that historians of Europe or the United States are accustomed to using. Even once you take into account the written documents (usually written by somebody with a preconceived idea about what Africans were like), oral traditions (usually passed down in such a way so as to bolster the reputations of certain rulers), and archeology and linguistics, you still are left with massive gaps. For me, I see these gaps not as an obstacle but as an opportunity, because I think it allows for a different and more honest kind of writing, an empathetic writing whereby you are trying to enter the world of your subject in order to understand their perspective. It is an art. Narrative itself is an art. The Western world for the most part has tried to divide everything into binaries, to say that either you are basing your writing on "facts" OR you are basing it on "imagination" or "embellishment." This presupposes that the "facts" of a person's life don't themselves contain imagination or embellishment, and it presupposes that these kinds of writing are entirely different or opposed to one another. What I'm trying to say here is that the division between "fiction" and "non-fiction" is not as clear as people make it seem. There is much in common between fiction and non-fiction writing because both make use of "facts" and "imagination" and both seek to construct narratives that will engage their audiences. The lie that history as an academic discipline (a discipline I am a part of) tries to tell is that you should write history in such a way that another historian could come after you, retrace your steps, and reach the same conclusions. This is a lie because it pretends that history is a science, which it most certainly is not. It pretends that the historian is just this invisible messenger of a discrete body of "facts" that he has discovered and wishes to share with the world. It ignores the fact that these "facts" are themselves subjective representations of reality that were created by some person somewhere. I don't know if I'm getting my meaning across. But what I want to say is that I know something of Stanley Crouch's worldview, know something of his writing, and know something of the work he has done researching Parker's life. Knowing these things, I now want to read his version of Parker's story. I'm not searching for the "definitive" account of his life because such a thing can never exist.

Well, I read the first chapter last night and thought it was great. I've never been a fan of anything Crouch has done in the past, but when somebody spends this long working on a subject, I pay attention. Also, I hate the comments on here about how people seem to be looking for a "sober" or "objective" perspective on Parker that sticks to "the facts." As a historian who cares about writing, I find all of this offensive. Good writing is good writing, and bad writing is bad writing.

You don't know it's crap.