A touchy subject, so bring your big boy pants

[Chuck Nessa]

That was exactly the lyrical waxing I was hoping for!

Knew I could count on you.

[Soul Stream]

Bowing out on the Vandermark thing for a moment (some good, a sizeable snoozy chunk), it's interesting to me that I can't think of any black jazz players in Austin currently. I don't go to a TON of gigs, but I have noticed it... granted, my transplant here was recently and for educational purposes, but...

My folks live in Houston now and the few jazz concerts I've been to there that were LOCAL were also all white folk on the stand. Not that I really care much or at all, but I wonder if this is a common thing in Texas especially. Some who have lived here longer than I could probably wax lyrically on this thought.

Yes, Texas is full of lame white people playing black music! What a drag! (But I keep forgetting nobody cares about that! -_- )

[clifford_thornton]

That's NOT what I was saying.

[JSngry]

In Dallas anyway, more than a few black jazz musicians are alive, well, and more often than not neither seeking involvement in nor participating in the "general" scene of white owned/patronized clubbage, "series", etc. Yet music continues to get made, peformances given, and players nurtured. The music tends to not be particularly "innovative", but the spirit is usually livlier and friskier. It's not anything "exclusive", but if you don't know about it/want to find it, you won't, and that doesn't seem to bother those involved one iota.

Guess they haven't yet gotten the word that it not "their" music any more...

Edited June 4, 2007 by JSngry

[ghost of miles]

They're fortunate indeed if no white critics have come along to tell them what is their music, as they've been doing from John Hammond on up to the present day.

[JSngry]

And another thing - I have next to never observed a black musician vibing a white one on the grounds of "entitlement". I have seen a lot of vibing about a misunderstanding/lack of understanding about things like nuance and "flavor", and if that gets too heated it will turn "racial" (and why shouldn't it, because almost always this understanding gap has its roots in the side-effects of American racial life), but if you can play and don't give off a wierd vibe like massive insecurity or massive assumed parity or anything like that, things usually get played out ok.

I do, however, see/hear a lot of white players getting all bent out of shape about black players feeling a "sense of attachment" to the music on personal, cultural grounds, to which I say GET YOUR HEAD OUTCHER ASS.

I guarantee you - if Eskimo Folk Music became something that the world went crazy over and there were dollars to be made and cultural institutions to be built and White People really got into playing the stuff because they really liked it and felt it at at least some level, there would be a "Eskimo Folk Music, once the province of a handful of people, has now become A Universal Language that the whole world participates in" thing going on, and that there would be some white people who got confused, insulted, hurt, whatever if/when they went to hang/jam with some Eskimo Folk musicians and felt a funny vibe, just as there would be some 5th generation Eskimo Surfboarder in SoCal who decided to reclaim his roots simply by saying that he was reclaiming his roots.

All this shit is really simple, but the acting out of it very seldom is.

[clifford_thornton]

That was exactly the lyrical waxing I was hoping for!

Knew I could count on you.

[ghost of miles]

Inclined to agree with what Jim says about the dance underground--and the thing is, "jazz" and "blues" as most of us here define and enjoy said musics, are already pretty much the stuff of museums.

It's hard for me to understand the basis of these types of sentiments.

Jazz is more relevant than ever because it's needed in this culture more than ever. Is jazz considered to simply be an artifact by some because it's not popular (as if it ever was--and to carry along that line of thinking, is American Idol relevant because it has mass appeal?). Is jazz an artifact because it doesn't have street cred or something? That's what John Hammond was saying about Ellington in 1935--his music was vapid because it was un-Negroid...Duke "has purposely kept himself from any contact with the troubles of his people..."

Speaking of John Hammond--but I don't see how that analogy really bears on the matter at hand. Relevant to whom is the question, I suppose. And yes, one can certainly say or argue that jazz has had a major influence on how modern music has evolved... one can travel down a Burnsian road (I say this with some ambivalence) and argue that it's had a positive impact on American society in general, though the happy "force-for-integration" narrative waaaaaayy oversimplifies what went down (topics touched upon in this thread giving some evidence, and speaking of Art Pepper's memoir...) But to say "Jazz is more relevant than ever because it's needed in this culture more than ever" is more ambitious slogan than it is a reflection of the music's status in present-day society. I love it, you love it, just about everybody here loves it, and it's certainly relevant to us. But it's not relevant to a good 95% or more of the folks out there. Sad, and I'd like to help change that to whatever degree I can, and hope to do so... one of the reasons why I'm here, as there's so much to learn from the others who post. I want to keep my ears (and my mind) open. Consigning most classic and/or straightahead jazz to a "museum" definition was perhaps a bit harsh. But I think it's headed that way, yes.

[Jim Alfredson]

Boy is this stuff out of control. or what?!!!!

Pretty much.

It goes both ways, folks. This weekend Root Doctor was up at the casino in Manistee and this guy comes up to Freddie during the break and asks him if he grew up in the South or in Chicago. Freddie says, no, he did not ever live in Chicago, but he was born in Mississippi. "Oh, so you grew up down there?" No, says Freddie, my family moved to Lansing MI when I was 3. The guy was flabergasted that a black guy like Freddie could sing like he does and be from a midwestern po-dunk town like Lansing.

Everybody has their own misconceptions, prejudices, assumptions, etc. If you let it bother you, you'll never get anywhere. I hear it all the time; "You play pretty good for a white boy." It doesn't bother me. I play what I play. I am honest with myself. I'm not trying to be something I'm not. That's all I can do.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Sorry, MG, I'm not at all hearing/feeling that at all, at least not in the stuff I've been getting into. Either we're hearing different things or hearing things differently.

Actually, thinking abut this a bit more, it seems to me that the point is not in the music itself, which is what I guess you're talking about, but in the environment to which it allows itself to conform.

There's little doubt in my mind that some at least of this music could be successful in Africa, were it on sale there. But I've never seen any of it on sale, either in Africa or the African quarter of Paris (perhaps a more likely place). I think this is a matter of price and profits. As with AIDS medications, the manufacturers are quite willing to sell their product in Africa but, if you think they're going to take a cent less in profit than they can make in the West, you're nuts.

In West Africa, the normal price of a new album is $2. Western companies CAN make a profit - the same tiny levels as indigenous firms - at that price. And sales are small; normal initial runs of an album in Senegal are about 30,000; an album that sells 250,000 is the equivalent of a ten million seller in the US. EMI, regrettably, was the only firm that seems to have been particularly active out there, and those subsidiaries are almost certain to get the boot now. But, if you were to ask Louis Vega and his competitors if they'd be happy to make the tiny profits available, were they to make the effort, they'd tell you either that they hadn't thought of it, or to fuck off.

In other words, this product is only for Westerners, no matter their ethnic origins.

MG

Edited June 4, 2007 by The Magnificent Goldberg

[JSngry]

But, if you were to ask Louis Vega and his competitors if they'd be happy to make the tiny profits available, were they to make the effort, they'd tell you either that they hadn't thought of it, or to fuck off.

I take it that you know Mr. Vega?

[JSngry]

http://www.samc.co.za/

[JSngry]

http://www.houseafrika.com/

[JSngry]

[JSngry]

http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/art/2006/2006j...60630-vega.html

House from a half pint

Little Louie Vega spoke to Niren Tolsi about being a master at work

The aptly named “Little Louie” Vega is short. So short, in fact, that if he were a nutter footballer his head butts would be delivered to opponents’ knees. But for DJ/producers stature is important only when it comes to the edginess of their musical output ... and being able to see over the mixing desks. Vega’s eminence, in the former particularly, during the Eighties and Nineties, ensures a gargantuan presence on the dance scene.

As one half of the Masters of Work production team with Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez, Vega’s reputation has been built on remixing music from Björk to Simply Red via Thievery Corporation, featuring David Byrne and Madonna. The duo’s eclectic approach to house compositions infused and influenced by a range of genres -- hip-hop, Latino, R&B, soul and so on -- have had critics positioning them as originators rather than acolytes in a dance-music scene sometimes bereft of originality.

Born Luis Fernando Vager in New York’s Bronx in 1965, “Little Louie” has a musical heritage. His father was a jazz saxophonist, while uncle Hector Lavoe was a vocalist with the Fania All-Stars.

Vega attributes his, and Gonzalez’s, genre-defying approach to living in New York -- a “musical melting pot” with a vibrant live-music scene.

Sitting in a Cape Town hotel room, Vega’s passion for any music with a soul is palpable: “I’ve been travelling more in the past 15 years and my music has grown to reflect that. There are now African/Brazilian influences, I’m working on Anane’s [his wife and Cape Verde vocalist] album and really getting into Cape Verde music at the moment,” he says.

South Africa has been a regular stop during Vega’s touring and he considers local house producers -- such as Oskido of Brothers of Peace (BOP) and the rest of the Kalawa Jazzme crew -- “family”. Vega also co-produced and remixed on BOP’s Zabalaza album, and recently remixed Hugh Masekela’s Spiyanko for the Vega Records Compilation One release: “There is soul in all music, but there is a certain type of sound that makes you feel a certain way. Especially the music that we play and make as Masters at Work, a lot of it is soul music but it could have a Brazilian influence, a gospel influence, an R&B influence, but there is a lot of soul to it. [south African producers] take that idea of soul and put it into their own culture and they mix it with house music and it is amazing how they have combined kwaito and house and a really South African flavour over the past few years,” says Vega, singling out music by BOP and Mafikizolo as especially popular during his sets in Europe and the United States.

The producer who won a Grammy earlier this year for his Remixed: The Curtis Mayfield Collection, believes that performing live with the seven-piece Elements of Life, as he did at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival earlier this year, has “always been a dream” -- one that has seen his career “come full circle where I was able to DJ, make music and now do it live with a full band”.

Vega’s previous experience with a live band was the NuYorican Soul project, which saw him working with a big band and artists such as jazz vibraphone player Roy Ayers, George Benson and Tito Puento.

During a time of musical regurgitation, when influences can easily become pastiche and homage, Vega believes that NuYorican Soul was “definitely a homage tribute album”, yet not in the imitative, conventional sense. For Vega and Gonzalez, it was an acknowledgement of physical and musical roots: “It was also a story, it was theatre to me. It is growing up in New York City ... Imagine walking past a building and in one window you are hearing Latin music, in another jazz, in another window soul music, gospel, hip-hop, R&B. And that is where we grew up, in neighbourhoods where you really listen to different music.”

About the danger of pastiche, Vega said: “We created a Masters of Work sound within the house genre, but we reached beyond that by bringing together a lot of different cultures and music into house music until it became something where the tempo is varied and it wasn’t house music any more.”

Vega started DJing as a 13-year-old and was approached by music industry suits to remix while DJing in clubs the Eighties: “They were like, ‘Louie, would you like to remix a record?’ and I didn’t even know what remixing was, I was like ‘What? What? ... What do you want me to do?’ Yeah,” he says.

The relationship with Gonzalez was born out of a mutual friendship with another house DJ/producer, Todd Terry: “There is a song called Salsa House that Kenny had done on his Dope Wax label -- a lot of breakbeats and stuff -- and I had heard this tune where he had sampled Cello Cruz and had Sylvester’s I Need You, this classic as well. So he sampled these two songs and made one out of it and I really liked it and I wanted to do a remix of it. And the next thing you know Todd Terry was like ‘Hey, I know this guy! He’s from Brooklyn, his name is Kenny Dope and he works at a record store called Record Centre.’”

Introductions led to hanging out which led to an exchange of beats and music: “He had this hip-hop love for music, while I had this club love for music and I grew up through the birth of hip-hop and played hip-hop in the early days, as well, so we had a lot of things in common.”

Vega was remixing mainly pop artists between 1985 and 1990 and eventually the two got together as the Masters at Work production team: “I was taking these pop artists and doing the remixes and on the B-side we’d do these Masters at Work dubs and just take it somewhere else musically.

“Nothing really to do with the artists, we’d just take maybe a hook from the artists, something that caught us and these tracks -- next thing you know -- became so popular that everybody wanted one, from Madonna to Michael Jackson, every-body wanted a Masters at Work mix,” he says of their success.

Touring with his multinational group, Elements of Life, and producing solo albums for many of the group’s members is all-consuming for Vega and, apart from reflecting a natural progression in his career, Vega the New Yorker believes there is an element of symbolism in the band performing in a post-9/11 milieu: “I think one of the reasons I did Elements of Life [EOL] was because it was about unifying cultures and bringing music and people together. When you look at the EOL crew it is a family of very talented people performing together.

“I think the message all around is that we need to come together and make it happen, and I think that is the message we try and bring through in our songs ... it’s not super-deep political, but it is a message that you can get from the music and the performance: We need to celebrate life and stick together,” he says.

[JSngry]

http://www.nextaid.org/PressReleases/pressrelease-reBOOT.htm

Release parties are being planned for San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Montreal and South Africa.

[JSngry]

http://www.podcastdirectory.com/podcasts/8360

[JSngry]

https://foryourears.com/frames.php?main=lab...amp;sub=grooved

[JSngry]

Ok, first of all, I'd ahte to be thought of as Organissimo's "Voice Of House" or anything like that. I don't go clubbing, I'm a 51 year old white male not that far out of the JazzCave (but never in its deepest bowels either...), and I've just been into it for about a year. What I've heard and what I hear is very much from/through/off/whatever the Internet. So asking me for any "real" information is like going to some heavy metal board, finding a guy who's got more than 15 jazz sides and hitting him up like the "resident jazz expert", dig?

But my impressions based on what I've seen/heard is this - this is not necessarily a "record store/hardware" driven music. There's umpteen jillion (literally!) DJ mixes, podcasts, etc. available online, and the house industry doesn't seem too bugged by it. I hear a mix or a song or a mix of a that I really dig, go to look to buy it, and at least 80% of the time it's only been available as a 12" that long ago sold out of how many ever copies of it were pressed. And a lot of the really hip mixes are "White Label", which means that they're totally bootleg remixes that somebody did and then circulated amongst fellow DJs, with maybe a few copies leaking out for sale on the street. Can't say that I've seen those for sale on the net, even though some seem to have gotten really popular amongst the cognoscenti.

What you can buy w/o too much difficulty is mp3 downloads of individual songs/mixes (this is very much a "singles" market, albums, with the exception of the really top-tier names, are almost alwasy compilations of singles. People with a sense of history will recognize this pattern from god knows hoe many other forms of popular music over the years...). And downloads, of course, can be and are available in damn near every corner of the planet, after which local entrepreneurs can have a blast...

As you can see form the links above, house has caught on in South Africa at least. Where else, if anywhere else, in Africa I don't have a clue. But I do know that African/African-based music is no stranger to the dance underground, and I suspect that with the ease of which music is transmitted globally over the net, it's out there elsewhere and that any "breakthrough" into the local marketplaces is due as much to local preferences and/or availability of dance clubs/DJs wanting/needing to play it as it anything.

As for the technology, here I really don't know what you really "need". If you got a drum machine to program beats, then all you really need is something to put on top of it, if that. And that can be as little or as much, as local or global, as sampled or as live as it wants/needs/is able to be. Of course you'd need something to record/mix it on, either old-school "studio equipment" or new-school computer tools, but who wouldn't need that?

I can also say this - this music is truly "underground" even in places its popular. It's main means of dissemenation and measurement of popularity is in clubs, not radio/tv, its labels are almost all indie/local, and its artists are the producers/djs (yes, contrary to Caveman Dogma, some of these cats have incredibly musical ears and chops), and occasionally some really badass singers like Jocelyn Brown. There ain't no "industry" to it in the MegaMajorLabel Music Machine sense, not at all. So sniping about how it's only for Westerners is not only not fully accurate (I don't think that Japan or South Africa were "Western" last time I looked...), it's pretty naive in its assumptions about where the music "is" in terms of overall "industry status". Not for nothing is it called the "dance underground"...

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

http://www.samc.co.za/

(& etc)

New albums on cassette sell for 5 or 6 times the West African price in Southern Africa. That's near what they'd cost in the US, if anyone made cassettes in the US any more. And gives a profit level that's commensurate with that in the West.

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

MG -- have you bought many market cassettes in yr travels? did you this time? SOMEDAY in the future i will post about the availability of African goods in New York City... Nigerian movies are ubiquitous & to this day, all but ignored by the press. (The Euros are a bit more aware of this, think I saw an article in Financial Times or some such when I first started researching.)

Don't know what you mean by "market cassettes" Clem.

I have about 600 albums on cassette - almost all are African. Some of them, I bought in Newark, NJ! And I saw a few guys flogging African cassettes (and books & etc) on 125 St.

These are the cassette I got in Paris the other week.

Now on to the K7s, at 3 Euro each! (Hit the thumbnail for a bigger image.)

First the Senegalese Mbalax material.

Fatou has a fabulous voice.

Mamadou was one of the original lead singers of Super Diamono, and I think the best of them.

Ablaye was featured a lot in the 90s with Youssou Ndour. This is his fourth album and the best – it’s one of the most beautiful Mbalax albums I’ve heard.

Assane Ndiaye began his career with Thione Seck but is now one of the most popular young singers in Senegal. He sings like an angel.

Alioune Mbaye, dit Nder, began his career with Lemzo Diamono. He’s never made a bad album.

I think this is the original issue of Youssou’s East/West album “Egypt”, on his own label Jololi.

An interesting album from Ouza – the first on which he’s incorporated a rapper.

Very intereting accoustic stuff. Most interesting album Super Diamono has made in 15 years.

To be continued

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Second installment

These two are more conventional Mbalax albums from the latest Senegalese sweetheart of Mbalax.

Now on to Djeliya material from Guinea & Senegal

This is slightly disappointing compred to her first album, but it’s a good average.

Djeuor is the son of the great classical kora player Soundioulou Cissokho and plays a slightly Mbalax-influenced kind of Djeliya.

Ibro Diabate is another of my firm favourites – a very soulful voice.

This is the Guinean Fode Kouyate (as opposed to the Malian one of that name, who’s dead).

Sekouba is, I think, the son of Guinea’s great tenor Kouyate Sory Kandia. He, too, has a great voice.

And now some Serahule Blues from Mali. Ganda Fadiga is the nearet I ever get to buying rural blues!

MG

[JSngry]

Getting back to the original thrust of this thread...

Lew Soloff vs Branford Marsalis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZjmrb3bjVo&NR=1

The Gil context gives all concerned cachet (and insporation, no doubt) , but left alone, who's going to tell me that, at this moment anyway, a hip young African-American saxophonist from New Orleans is "deeper into the music" than a bald, middle-aged New York Jew? You could argue that age and experience give Soloff an unfair avantage here, but hey - plenty of older and more experienced dumbass fools are still going around making noise that ain't about shit. So give it up for Lew Soloff and let that be that, ok?

Examples like this might not abound, but they do exist on a level that is not extremely rare, not by a long shot. So anybody, anybody, who tries to frame the issue as a case of simple either/or, only need to listen/feel with your eyes, is obviously a threat to humanity and should be exterminated as quickly and painlessly as possible. If you ain't got the guts to do ityourself, surely you got $500.00 and a phone.

And WOE be unto those who think that something like this means that anybody can do it just by saying that they are. 50% off for that deal, I'm told...

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Getting back to the original thrust of this thread...

Lew Soloff vs Branford Marsalis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZjmrb3bjVo&NR=1

The Gil context gives all concerned cachet (and insporation, no doubt) , but left alone, who's going to tell me that, at this moment anyway, a hip young African-American saxophonist from New Orleans is "deeper into the music" than a bald, middle-aged New York Jew? You could argue that age and experience give Soloff an unfair avantage here, but hey - plenty of older and more experienced dumbass fools are still going around making noise that ain't about shit. So give it up for Lew Soloff and let that be that, ok?

Examples like this might not abound, but they do exist on a level that is not extremely rare, not by a long shot. So anybody, anybody, who tries to frame the issue as a case of simple either/or, only need to listen/feel with your eyes, is obviously a threat to humanity and should be exterminated as quickly and painlessly as possible. If you ain't got the guts to do ityourself, surely you got $500.00 and a phone.

And WOE be unto those who think that something like this means that anybody can do it just by saying that they are. 50% off for that deal, I'm told...

Lew did some really exciting playing with Earland.

MG

[JSngry]

A consistently fine player he's been, actually, quiet as it's kept. His playing could easily be of the "uber-competent studio player for all occasions" variety, and its roots might well be there, but there's always been a little something extra to go along with it, and yeah, that matters.

But for the type of people this thread was likely predicated upon, the type who only listen with their eyes and seek confirmation of "authenticity" thereby, dude, he ain't got a chance!