umum_cypher

Hmmm... I've got this on now, and it's a bit Radiohead-y. (They don't sound like anyone except Radiohead copyists, normally ... I hope that's not what they're becoming themselves. I have that problem with Bjork nowadays). I'd start elsewhere: Hail To The Thief is my favourite, you'll like it I'm sure. Kid A and Amnesiac are intermittently superb. Closet proggers love OK Computer, of course. The website is inrainbows.com, but it's pretty busy.

Listening to this later - what does anyone think? Is it better than The Eraser?

The Smith is unresearched nonsense and makes Kofsky look right-of-centre. Dizzy Gillespie is quoted saying something that includes the word 'people' and is immediately co-opted by Smith as a card-carrying fellow traveller.

New Yorkers!!! All nearby lovers of polystylistic-but-basically-serial-angst and gesamtkunstwerk hi-techery!!! Go to this!!! It's amazing!!! Bernd Alois Zimmermann Die Soldaten Oper in vier Akten nach dem gleichnamigen Schauspiel von Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz Lincoln Center Festival 2008 Aufführungsart: szenisch Orchester: Bochumer Symphoniker Dirigent: Steven Sloane Inszenierung: David Pountney Kostüme: Marie-Jeanne Lecca Bühnenbild: Robert Innes Hopkins Eine Produktion der RuhrTriennale 05.07.2008 Lincoln Center, Armory Hall - New York, NY (Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika) - 19.30 h 07.07.2008 Lincoln Center, Armory Hall - New York, NY (Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika) - 19.30 h 09.07.2008 Lincoln Center, Armory Hall - New York, NY (Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika) - 19.30 h 11.07.2008 Lincoln Center, Armory Hall - New York, NY (Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika) - 19.30 h 12.07.2008 Lincoln Center, Armory Hall - New York, NY (Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika) - 19.30 h

The book clearly made a strong impression on you!

Isn't that a bit patronising? Those young-in-the-50s musicians who idol-worshipped Bird that I've talked to - these are Lee Morgan's friends colleagues etc - paid attention to what he said in any context, face-to-face, in print. They may have been musicians eventually, but at first they were the biggest fans there were. And they read Down Beat. (Lee himself near-parrots a Bird Down Beat quote in his own Down Beat interview of 1961). Musical knowledge and understanding doesn't come out of thin air; eventually, the sound, what's on record, is enough. But I don't doubt that those seeking a way in to music that was (for the amateurs they were, at some point) baffling in its construction, would turn their noses up at an analysis/intellectualisation that had come, supposedly, from the horse's mouth.

Beyond (or in the midst) the idea of veracity and fidelity in history writing - how right it seems to us - is the idea of creative feedback and misinterpretation in the past - how the history writing seemed to them. What I want to know is how many of the musicians in the generation after Bird, who really did seize on those upper extensions for melodic and harmonic material, came to that by reading the Chilli House story and, in the quest to be like Bird, took it as gospel. 'Doesn't sound like him - but it sounds good anyway.' Maybe none, but you see what I mean.

The fact that the issue's 'fraught' only makes it more ripe for investigation, doesn't it? ... for obvious reasons The Sources, printed or speaking, won't help much, but there's bits and bobs here and there: Down Beat, 28/12, 8 June 1961, p. 19-22. 'Inside the Cannonball Adderley Quintet, Pt 1', Don DeMichael Nat Adderley: “The thing that involves this whole movement – the soul music thing – could be construed as a racial thing. It can be very well construed that way, and a lot of people construe it to mean that if you got soul, or to have soul, you’ve got to be a Negro. … [t]here were a whole lot of guys – a whole lot of good Negro musicians who weren’t working very regularly when the vogue was the cool west coast sound, because everybody who was cool and west coast was white. So you get a thing 10 years later that is a big commercial gimmick, soul music, and everybody involved in it is colored. So naturally you get a thing back … the way [the "musician in Harlem" is] looking at this thing is, 'They didn’t say anything about the west coast music – they let the cool music run for 10 years. Now we got something to go; we got soul music. And finally, I’ve got a job. I can work in the clubs, and already, they’re trying to kill it.'" [the they is critics, of course]

So what does it mean that all the negative press quotes come from British sources? Did no-one else in the world perceive any irony? I've been thinking about this for a few days, after getting Yaron Herman's new trio CD in the post - a considered, accomplished thing, but with an unfunny, ungood cover of Britney's 'Toxic' plonked in the middle. With Gerald Cleaver reduced to polite metronome.

No problem with Ratliff per se, but who are these people who are waking up, even today, and saying That's it - I will write a book about Coltrane?

An email..... Richard Cook 1957-2007 It's with the very deepest sadness that I have to inform you of the passing of Richard Cook, one of the greats of UK music journalism and arguably the finest jazz writer this country has produced. After the sudden recurrence of the cancer he was diagnosed with last year, Richard died in the early hours of Saturday August 25. I knew him well at NME in the '80s and thought him one of its finest contributors in that period. With Brian Morton, who worked with him when he edited The Wire, Richard co-authored the indispensable and incomparable Penguin Guide To Jazz Recordings. He was also the author of a definitive book on the Blue Note label, as well of Richard Cook's Jazz Companion. He is survived by his wife Lee Ellen. We have put together a small tribute to Richard on Rock's Backpages, at <http://www.rocksbackpages.com> Barney Hoskyns Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages The Online Library of Rock & Roll /////////////////////////////////////////// I learned more about jazz through the 1st Penguin Guide than any amount of general histories - I'm sure there are plenty like me.

I think the gramophone horn is actually a miniature trumpet. It seems that the TV show was called "The Trumpet" ('Trumpeten' in Swedish), presumably dedicated to (jazz?) trumpeters. Those really were the days...

Weird fingerings hey, trumpet types? Oh to have lived in a world where a) Kenny Dorham was on a TV programme and b) the presenter of said programme made his announcement while a waitress stood next to him with a bowl of porkchops, and then later while waving around a little tiny gramophone horn. Was this directed by Buñuel? Such a shame KD had such a poor(ly) late-60s. He really got to something new in 62-64.

So what's the book itself like, Sheldonm?

Well, that was a secondary question. I have no reason to suspect they use images in their books without permission, but there's an animated gif on that page up there with some Frank Wolff and Val Wimer (and others') images that caught my attention, that's all.

Has anyone seen Parker's new book of 'political thoughts, musicological essays and poems'? Who Owns Music? (A question Buddy's Knife might ask themselves is 'who owns the copyright to some of the photos that we are using on our site?')

I got through school without 'studying Churchill'. I suppose we must have done him and WWII in primary school, but in secondary school we went straight from Romans to Anglo Saxons to the Industrial Revolution, and then to the Russian Revolution and USSR. No WWII, no WWI for that matter. No Churchill (didn't get to Yalta I don't think). So it's been like this for some time (though atcually I wouldn't trust the 'this' if it comes from The Sun). But I spent a summer working in the Churchill Museum in Whitehall, where I mainly skulked around the gift shop watching war DVDs, so I know most of his speeches by heart now. Had some good conversations with the tourists. 'We need a guy like that in charge now, huh!'. OK. 'I didn't know you guys were in the war too!'. Oh. 'World War I, that was between the US and the Japs, right?'. Er...

If it really is that "easy... for any decent jazz pianist to [do] better", why aren't there dozens of people doing it? ????? Guy Not to [do] better, to better. People don't do it [where 'it' = a pseudo-compositional, pseudo-improvisational mishmash forced through the filter of concert/hall procedure, etiquette and associated prestige] because it's a rubbish idea in the first place. Improvisers improvise with other improvisers and play off/with them, not, generally, themselves. Don't wonder where the copyists are, just be grateful for small mercies! [emoticon further upgraded]

This is worth arguing about! The way that Jarrett cloaks his practice of 'improvisation' in mystical-Romantic self-righteousness is revolting, especially since his approach to 'improvisation' is so facile and banal, so reliant on pre-determined structure and textual noodle. His trio/standards stuff I've steered clear of, but from the early days of on-the-spot Joni Mitchell pastiches to the more recent, more glacial, (even) more precious miniaturism, the guy has always been a free improviser for people who don't like free improvisation and don't realise how easy it would be for any decent jazz pianist with a similar inclination/complex to better, and who himself doesn't like improvising, doesn't like improvisers, and treats musicians who don't conform to his own delusional aesthetics with the same contempt as he does his audiences. [edit: emoticon upgrade]

Good post, David.

You'd think Mosaic could've have left that one out....

Something I've been pondering for a while is a point of Theodor Gracyk's, made in the context of a somewhat reactionary and disingenuous argument about the politics of musical/cultural appropriation. He says (paraphrasing): the complaint that a given artform is denied recognition and should have a wider audience, be granted more funding etc etc, is logically incompatible with the complaint that given artform might fall/has fallen prey to theft/appropriation. His example, as I remember is MTV: is was right, he says, that black musicians should have complained that in its early days MTV screened no videos by black artists. But, he goes on to say, that complaint - when answered - rendered invalid subsequent complaints that black music (hip hop the case in point) had become too-widely adopted by 'outside' (i.e. white) audiences. There are problems with this argument, but I still think it's compelling. And the contradiction could be found in jazz history of course - if, for example, those involved with the Jazz and People's Movement in the early 70s subsequently pulled the appropriation thing. But Allen, I'd still be wary about pinning all this on Harper without the transcript, although point taken, the argument's not exactly a rhetorical rarity one way or the other...

Just wanted to add -- if Barak/White Lightning claims that Harper said that, then Harper said that. Guy Sure, I wasn't casting aspertions on WL's integerity, but if we really want to talk about this idea in relation to Billy Harper, then a gloss isn't enough, we need to see the actual words, that's all. Re: 5 Spot Audience. May well be so - but isn't also true that clubs like the Blue Coronet in Brooklyn were providing jazz to overwhelmingly black audiences at the same time? This is the problem isn't it, the documentary evidence for this kind of thing is patchy, and the 'samples' taken to construct cases for jazz's relative popularity/decline/whatever tend to be taken from the most familiar, visible or easily available sources. Which is not at all to doubt the 5 Spot point, but to say that there were a lot of less visible/local scenes which might prove the opposite.

We aren't talking about Billy Harper's interpretation of history here, we're talking about White Lightening's report of his interpretation, with no primary evidence before us, but with that in mind - Surely there's a kernal of truth to pretty much everything Harper reportedly says, but it's surrounded by such a thick husk of bullshit that the truth value is hard to get at. For instance, segregation and the resultant dissipation of black capital was certainly a factor in the lessening of work and in/formal education opportunities for black jazz musicians ('The White establishment used its funds to move the venues away from the Black Neighborhoods into the white ones'), but that overlooks how important white capital (indie labels, clubs) were to jazz during its boomtime, and doesn't explain why other forms were able to flourish in jazz's place without (supposedly) those kinds of black-owned resources. 'Jazz needs subsidy to survive as much as the opera - but the White establishment never subsidized Jazz': opera is expensive as hell to put on (this is not an argument for opera's subsidizing, it's a fact). But why should jazz have needed subsidizing in a way that hip hop didn't? Why could a jazz quartet fail because of a lack of subsidy but three MCs and One DJ succeed, in the same place, at the same time, before the same audience? The patronage and subsidizing needs to come from a core audience first, that's why. My money's on Freelancer. One of the most difficult things for historians to explain, after as many social and material influences as you can think of have been evaluated, is the fact that styles and tastes simply change. It's frustrating not to be able to pin that on anything particular (education policies, material resources, concentration of demographics, socio-political influences), but there you go - it's vague even beyond the need for 'immediacy'. Has anyone read Brian Ward's Just My Soul Responding? It's very dense and very good on this, as I remember. One of the worst things about this kind of cult-nat derived rhetoric (the 'white man' made us do this, educated us to do that) - and if I'm wary of the report it's because in two long interviews I did with BH he didn't talk or even seem to be conceptualizing like that - is that it allows black Americans in history and in the present no agency whatsoever, and there's nothing more depressing than someone denying their own power to resist or influence events, even in the knoweldge that they themselves have put up such resistance and had such influence, in order to solidify in their own minds and those of their audiences a simplistic historical explanation based on emotive and attractive racial alliegences. Though, eventually, I take his points! I would write more here but I have a policy document to present at my meeting with the White Establishment this morning. (We're going to make 50 Cent do an album of Bellini arias). [edited to increase verbiage]

Look, I don't want to come across as a total prick, but there's a recent book about all this ------ My favourite treatment of the subject is in Chapple and Garofalo's brilliant Rock and Roll is Here to Pay. The book's long out of print, but I liberated all the best bits for mine. Was that terribly annoying?