Face of the Bass

Excellent restraint, my friend!

Thanks guys! It's been a good day.

This is IMO one of the best Mosaic sets. I'm not one to jump on the bandwagon of every set, but if I was only allowed to keep five of my Mosaics, this would probably be one of the ones I would hang onto.

PM sent on the Roland Kirk box.

I will say this: Mainly because of the hype that often surrounds these releases, I find that I am more likely to be disappointed by a Mosaic set than another box set. Basically, I've bought too many in the past. But there are a few that I do love.

Picked up a copy of this at the Vision Festival last night for $70. Very much looking forward to listening to it. Kind of wondering if the first track on the first disc is a tribute to Ingrid Thulin...

I will be there on Saturday night....the only time I could make it down for the week, but I always try to go out of my way to see Joelle Leandre.

Bump, with some updates.

To the initial question: the most essential Sun Ra that has been released has been the stuff that Evidence put out. Almost everything that Evidence reissued in the 1990s and early 2000s is classic Sun Ra. The Art Yard stuff is good but tends to come from the mid-to-late 1970s, whereas the Evidence material is mainly from the 1950s and 1960s.

Do we know when it is being released?

Last week was supposed to be the release date for the latest Analog Africa release, The Bariba Sound, but all the usual suspects seem to have delayed shipment. Any idea what is going on with this one?

Just wanted to say that I finished reading this book today, and IMO it is a truly excellent and moving work, in some ways more enjoyable than his biography of Monk. (Full disclosure: I'm an African historian with a particular interest in African music so this book is right up my alley.) Anyway, I give it my highest recommendation. The entire book is excellent, though I think I enjoyed the chapters on Guy Warren and Sathima Bea Benjamin the most.

I traded in my order for the seemingly permanently delayed Hawkins set and got the Johnny Smith one instead. I'm happy with that choice after listening a few times to all eight discs. Very enjoyable music.

I read through this thread last night and found it very useful. I am currently writing my dissertation on African history, based on field research I did in Namibia. The topic is corporal punishment, a gloomy subject to say the least. As I've been thinking ahead to where I want to take my career after this chapter is finished, I've been thinking a lot about using music as a way to understand cultural exchanges on the continent. I got this idea after listening to some of the truly haunting music (Chemirocha comes to mind) found in the Hugh Tracey recording series released by SWP records. I've been incorporating more African music into the way I teach African history, and lately I've been listening a lot to the four-disc Dust-to-Digital set, and more recently some of the offerings on Strut Records and on Analog Africa. The Mbaqangwa music found on the Next Stop-Soweto set is fantastic stuff. I've also been listening to a lot of West African, Afrobeat music, but it seems to me that the reissues we are seeing now perhaps focus too heavily on West Africa and especially on the music from the 1970s. I think I'd like to see more releases from the colonial period, and probably more releases of music collected by ethnographers rather than popular releases.

What I like about music is finding ways to connect the work to the context from which it emerged. In another medium, Leni Riefenstahl is actually a perfect example of this. Watching Triumph of the Will or even looking at some of her African photographs from after the War are great ways to try and understand the relationship between fascism and art. I "enjoy" consuming that kind of art just as much as any other kind, because it makes me think, and that is what I want art to do. But then again, I'm a historian, so I'm always trying to find ways into understanding the past, and one of those ways is through art and music, unquestionably. Now, there is also art that I think has a moral dimension that I am receptive to as well, and so that adds perhaps another dimension to how I appreciate the actual content of the thing in question.

I've a feeling that this is one area where the discussion can quickly get over-academicised (no idea if this word exists but you get the idea, right? ) to death. Not that this angle would be without interest but somehow I fear there will be too much that will be projected into it from today's point of view to prove a point valid to TODAY'S "scholars" but not necessarily relevant to those who were around back then. I'd hate to see more "Swing Shifts" being written on that subject by more Sherrie Tuckers. All scholarship, whether it comes dressed in academic jargon or not, is concerned with the problems of the present. The idea of "objective" history is a fantasy. And Allen, I don't believe it is possible to write a history that "just focuses on the music," as if the music exists independently from the social context within which it emerged. It's not about having an ax to grind, it's about trying to understand the relationship between jazz and the cultures in which it has developed, both American and elsewhere. Well I think it would depend on how you define middle class. But even if what you say is true, then certainly a history that looks at the relationship between jazz and the middle class would be very interesting indeed. I would much rather read that than yet another regurgitation of jazz and race.

Once we get beyond the concept in the abstract, just what do you think the contours of a class-based look at jazz would be? Do you see class distinctions, apart from race, as central to the trajectory of jazz history? I can't say for sure, but I think it's possible. One thing that you see in jazz history--and this is probably an oversimplification--but it seems like the music moves from the streets, and, as it becomes more accepted as an art form, into the academy. At the same time, jazz at its peak was not entirely a working or poor man's music. Miles came from the middle class, etc. And many white jazz musicians came from poor backgrounds or broken homes. So there's something there as well. And then you also have the long-standing reality that many jazz musicians were black but that the audience for the music becomes increasingly white. This would involve a significant class dynamic in and of itself, since during the postwar era the average black person was significantly poorer than the average white person. There's also a strong argument to be made for a gendered analysis of jazz history, not just because the instrumentalists are overwhelmingly men, but also because of the kind of masculinity they project--especially within the black community. Obviously, the discourses on race, class, and gender all intersect in various ways. And as should be clear from this response I haven't myself fully thought through how these dynamics play themselves out in the history of jazz. But I wish someone would do that, instead of regurgitating the tired arguments about jazz as a black music, about the forgotten white contributions to jazz, etc. That seems like a field that has been played out and I don't think I've heard anything original on jazz and race in a long time.

Chomp. Chomp. Chomp. I don't know what that means, but what I mean is that the discussions usually end up being very, very predictable, with the same fault lines, same rhetoric, etc. I'd like to see someone write a history of jazz with class rather than race as the primary framework.

American discussions of race sometimes feel very claustrophobic, or rather, like we are all working with a kind of generally accepted shorthand that probably should not be accepted at all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjSEVSvDkhw

So what were the Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, French etc doing in the 16th and 17thC? The Enlightenment was not purely an 18th century phenomenon, though that is when it reached its zenith. But more to the point, the colonialism of the 19th century, inspired by nationalism and by scientific racism, was of a different nature than the colonialism of earlier centuries. Also, Pete, I'm putting you on Ignore. I've never liked you much, and it has absolutely nothing to do with politics.

Really? Is there a special code in the pixels that lets you tell the race of members? Yes. "Post-colonial theory" gives him special powers... (nb: I used to piss him off from the left when he was a pre-grad-school right winger. Now I can piss him off from a different corner of the left than his, i.e. the one that still cherishes those corny old European enlightenment values.) You're not a racist, you just happen to think that the cultural and intellectual heritage of Europe is superior. It's funny because it was the Enlightenment that led to colonialism in the first place.

The most "inbred" part of this thread right now seems to be that almost everybody here is white.

Baraka is a better writer than anyone in this thread. I don't think the poem is especially good, but aside from the conspiratorial nonsense, I don't think it is bad either. But again, it works better as spoken word than on the printed page. That's an impossible question to answer unless you provide an example of a right-wing rant. Of course, part of the problem is that there is more truth to left-wing rants than right-wing ones.

The other thing about those anti-Jewish poems of Baraka's is that he's clearly trying to provoke a response there. He was probably feeling empowered by radical, violent imagery at that time. My only point in this thread is that those poems should not define his whole output, and that he later repudiated them. Whether people want to say that his lines in Somebody Blew Up America show he's still an anti-Semite at heart is up for them to decide. I don't think he is.