jon abbey

just seeing this now... BTW, I saw Jon Abbey thanked in Ben Ratliff's "Jazz Ear" (no snickering, it's good light bathroom reading). Funny, cause on "another jazz board" he was chased off for calling jazz a "historical genre". "Chased off" may be a slight exaggeration. Jon has far too strong a personality to be "chased off" from anywhere; witness some of the exchanges on the "I Hate Music" board for instance. Matthew: yep, the music biz is very depressing, but I'm still here, and I think Erstwhile had its best year creatively in quite some time in 2009. Hoppy: yep, Ben is a good friend of mine and I proofread that for him and offered some suggestions. my statement about jazz being a 'historical genre' (which I think is true, but I was actually just repeating something John Butcher had told me) was made for the first time about ten years before I left JC, but nice try.

Ratliff was born in 1968. In 1984 he would have been 16. When I was 16, in Westchester, right next door to Rockland County, live jazz was certainly available to me. Me and my pals would go to jazz clubs in Manhattan and were never carded. But maybe things had changed in the ten years separating me from Ratliff, age-wise, or maybe his family moved away earlier than that. Ben was DJing at KCR by the time he was a Columbia undergrad, so he was hip to jazz at a pretty young age, especially for a child of the eighties. I know he initially turned me onto Morton Feldman (specifically the For Bunita Marcus on Hat Art), which I'll be forever grateful for.

everyone misses a lot of music, too much for anyone to hear in a lifetime.

I'll defer to Ian Penman, I agree with every word: http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/214/ first sentence: "For the pop life of me, I cannot see why anyone past the age of 17 would want to listen to Frank Zappa again, never mind revere him as a deep and important artist, never mind worship at the tottering edifice of his recollected, remastered and repackaged works."

this is dead on. not sure if you mean it the same way that I do, but the current jazz era of regurgitation and recapitulation goes against everything jazz originally stood for: delving into new territory, exploding through what were thought to be barriers, finding your own voice and expressing yourself to the best of your abilities. jazz is such an innately constrained area that this has been impossible to do for decades, and is why jazz has been a stagnant (at best) art form for a long time now (I'd say since Miles left in 1975). but the spirit of jazz is alive and well in other areas of music, it's a crucial underpinning for plenty of the most exciting music happening today, just not jazz itself. Quite true - both JSangry's statement above and your comment. But if this is so, and if it is being realized by jazz fans, then I wonder why everybody in the "established" jazz world sneered at that entire RETRO-SWING or NEO-SWING movement throughout the 90s. Agreed, some bands were just musically oversimplistic or downright mediocre, others were more clownery than substance, but there were enough musically interesting bands that have added a new twist to the entire swing/jump blues genre by fusing swing with rockabilly/ska/punk influences AND managing to spark new and ongoing interest in the old masters among a younger generation of listeners and (above all) DANCERS. Here in Europe at any rate, this subculture definitely still exists, though the Neo-swing wave has ebbed off quite a bit since the late 90s here too. Or is it that exploring new territory in jazz is only OK to the keepers of the jazz flame if you use hard bop/post-bop/post-electric-Miles as your STARTING point and anything that uses older forms of jazz for reference is automatically labeled "old hat" or "reactionary" or whatever?? If so, then the stagnation that jazz seems to find itself in serves jazz right. Remember there was a time when jazz was quite legitimately considered a musical form designed primarily for dancing and having fun in an extrovert way instead of a musical background for musing over the relative merits of an augmented 137th vs a doubly flatted 93rd into one's long, grey but oh so sophisticated beard. :D I don't think anyone's to blame, I just think it's a function of an area being pretty thoroughly explored. there are always new directions to go in music, but at this point, those are outside of jazz's boundaries.

some great posts from Jim here: this is dead on. not sure if you mean it the same way that I do, but the current jazz era of regurgitation and recapitulation goes against everything jazz originally stood for: delving into new territory, exploding through what were thought to be barriers, finding your own voice and expressing yourself to the best of your abilities. jazz is such an innately constrained area that this has been impossible to do for decades, and is why jazz has been a stagnant (at best) art form for a long time now (I'd say since Miles left in 1975). but the spirit of jazz is alive and well in other areas of music, it's a crucial underpinning for plenty of the most exciting music happening today, just not jazz itself.

hey!

all for way more than you can buy them for online. I used to work near the Times Square Virgin and stopped in there occasionally at lunch, no loss IMO.

if you mean musicians, definitely, most can't even make 10 minutes of great music, let alone a full LP or CD or double CD. most films and books suck too, that doesn't change my point/s.

as someone who's pretty obsessed with putting CDs together, for me a pretty good analogy is books. a LP would be the equivalent of maybe a 200 page book, the 3 minute 78s cited earlier would be a short story. with a CD, you have the possibility of a 400 page book, and I'll personally always take a great 400 page book over a great 200 page book, just for the potential scope. the longer something is, the more of a major statement it can (potentially) be. a fantastic, cohesive double CD is more exciting to me than three or four fantastic, cohesive single CDs. and sure, if your preference is 20 minutes at a time, that's a personal thing, but I have trouble understanding how you sit through a film or a concert or anything longer than that. I have attention span issues at times too, but if something is fantastic, the longer the better IMO. there's also no one holding you at gunpoint to devote 100 percent attention to the music every second that it's on, it's an environment that you live in for however long it lasts (or however long you want to keep it on).

no one is more aware of this than me. maybe you should be listening to better CDs then?

well then "many of you" should realize that CDs have been around for 20+ years now and adapt yourselves to the current reality. all of us grew up having to sit through commercials on TV too, but it doesn't take long with a DVR (or a VCR) to realize you can fast forward through them. do you walk out of concerts after 20 minutes also?

CDs are not inherently too long, I have way more problems with the inherent length limitations of LPs (as Chuck touched on) than on the wider range of possibilities allowed by a CD. most of AMM's catalog wouldn't fit very easily on vinyl, with single 60 or 70 minute tracks, not to mention something like Feldman's For Bunita Marcus or Triadic Memories.

actually a CD gives you a lot more leeway to make a stronger overall statement, assuming you have the material. my favorite Ersts (Duos for Doris, Good Morning Good Night, between), are all long double CDs, in the 100-140 minute range.

hugely important and almost never perfectly executed, it's a real focus of mine as a producer.