Welcome back!

[Quincy]

Classy! I feel like I'm wearing finer clothes as I'm reading posts.

[sheldonm]

I went to see the Bobby Broom Trio tonight and Joe G and Rachel were there.....Joe told me the forum was up and running.....wooooohoooo!

m~

[DukeCity]

Great to be back! Thanks Jim and everyone for your hard work gettin' this thing back up and running!

[BFrank]

Nice work. I'm sure it was a REAL drag to go through the rebuild.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

Let's see if this works. So far, I have been unable to post.

[Bluerein]

Good work Jim et al. looks nice and feels good to be able to chat again......

[Tom Storer]

Good work, Jim and Jason! Great to have this place back.

Let me second the request for a bigger-font display. You young people just don't know what it's like to peer at tiny font through bifocals.

[GA Russell]

Thanks for all your efforts Jim!

I'm looking forward to contributing to the next fund drive. You don't miss your water...

[Jim Alfredson]

Just got back from my gig. Jason is running one more query on the database to update the IP address table. If you notice a little slowness for the next few hours, that is why. The query should be done no later than 9am. Myself? I'm going to bed!

[Jim Alfredson]

Just got back from my gig. Jason is running one more query on the database to update the IP address table. If you notice a little slowness for the next few hours, that is why. The query should be done no later than 9am. Myself? I'm going to bed!

[Herb]

It is a tad slow, but working well, now. Thanks, Jim!

[Jim Alfredson]

hmm... this thread seems to be a little funky, probably due to posts being added after the fact because of the query taking up so many resources while it was running... might have to axe it.

[Jim Alfredson]

Nope... looks like we're getting javascript errors overall. I've notified Jason from Invision Tech Support. I'm sure he'll get to the bottom of it.

[David Ayers]

THANKS JIM!!!!

And a big WELCOME BACK to everyone!

[Larry Kart]

Damn -- I posted something fairly long (and kind of important to me) on the Gary Burton thread, toward the tail end of things and in response to something Jim Sangrey said about paying attention to technical matters, and now it's not there. Can anyone help recover it?

[Soulstation1]

James Oscar

Thanks Again

[Van Basten II]

Finally back

[Kalo]

Like GA Russell wrote above, "You don't miss your water..."

Thanks!

[Jim Alfredson]

Damn -- I posted something fairly long (and kind of important to me) on the Gary Burton thread, toward the tail end of things and in response to something Jim Sangrey said about paying attention to technical matters, and now it's not there. Can anyone help recover it?

Larry,

I'm bummed that we lost some posts. Unfortunately there's nothing I can do, unless Google happened to archive it between the time you posted it and when the board went down. I really apologize... we've never lost posts before, but there's a first time for everything.

[sal]

I dig the new look of the board. Not having the peach color will make it look much more discrete as I cruise the board at work.

[Jim Alfredson]

Jason fixed the javascript error. Everything should be functioning normally now. Thanks for your understanding, everyone!

[Simon Weil]

Great to have you back!

Damn -- I posted something fairly long (and kind of important to me) on the Gary Burton thread, toward the tail end of things and in response to something Jim Sangrey said about paying attention to technical matters, and now it's not there. Can anyone help recover it?

It was on google, as Jim suggested. Don't know how long for, though. So I'll take the liberty:

Posted by: Larry Kart Today, 12:10 PM

QUOTE(JSngry @ Jun 24 2007, 09:19 AM)

...

Then there's the people who learn a little bit, think it's a lot, and since most people don't know enough to call them on it, run with it like crazy, and set up their own little fiefdom of "informed criticism". I run like hell when I see these type coming. (and oh btw - Martin William's "declaration" that Coltrane combined modality with pedal point whereas Ornette combined it with atonality is to my mind the definitive example of this type of silliness).

Then there's the people like Larry Kart (god bless him) who know what they don't know, know that they don't really want/need to know it, but recognize that it nevertheless is a critical part of the whole process and should be respected as such. Larry's "dismissal" of the whole Burton/Bill Evans/etc vibe as "pastoral" pretty much sums it up for me, but you'll notice that Larry's analyses are highly refined dissections of personal response that never resort to anything even resembling the willful ignunce of the "don't know don't want to know shut up get outta my face widdit" crowd. And Right the fuck on for that!

...

It takes all types.

Thanks for the compliment, Jim, but that's not quite the way I see myself and/or what I've been up to over the years. While I hope I do know what I don't know and don't pretend otherwise (for reasons of personal safety/sanity, if nothing else) I do often strongly "want/need" to know (or at least speculate about, within the limits of my lack of technical knowledge -- can I get away with saying "my lack of 'formal' technical knowledge"?) all sorts of more or less technical matters in jazz, and in music in general. There are several reasons (or rationalizations) for this that I've come up with over time. First, in arguably related ways (though perhaps related more in retrospect or in terms of semi-parallel paths), in both the history of modern concert music and the history of jazz to some significant degree, the impulses and forces of development/difference/change have both had and/or been said to have a significant technical basis. That is, people not only were doing new things technically in those realms (and new things in terms of sensibility as well), they were thinking and saying that what they were doing was necessary and aesthetically worthwhile BECAUSE it had (and/or was inseperable from) these supposedly novel technical bases -- and, of course, they also used this fact or claim to promote and justify the quality and aesthetic/social necessity of the music they were making. The tricky part, or one tricky part, is that while I think it's undeniable that in both of these streams of "modern" music "the impulses and forces of development/difference/change have had a significant technical basis," the relationship between what's actually been going on in those musics (technically and otherwise) and what its most adept formulaters/systemizers/analyzers/what have you (some of them of course among the key music makers themselves) have said and thought was going on around them and in their own practice (if they were in fact music makers themselves) doesn't always add up when when encounters the results in context on, so to speak, "the plane of realization." On that plane, on the one hand, one often finds that the music has had striking consequences/results that were different from what the formulaters/systemizers/analyzers/actual "genius" music makers/what have you -- from Debussy to Schoenberg to Bird to Trane to Ornette to Ayler -- had or seem to have had in mind. That is, whatever else was going on, there was a perhaps quite understandable (given the actual novelty of what was afoot) divergence at times between what was said and thought to be going on technically and what actually was going on technically -- at least, again, in terms of results/consequences. In large part I think that was because the actual novelty of what was popping out of the aesthetic bottles was not capturable/formulatable by even the most self-aware, sophisticated, cutting edge figures. See George Russell's dialogue with Martin Williams about Ornette and Trane in the June 1960 issue of The Jazz Review for a striking example of this. Russell is so on the money about many key things that one could weep with frustration thinking about all the ways the evolving music was going to escape his grasp over time -- and over not too long a period of time either, and it was both his grasp as an analyst/formulator and as a creator himself that arguably was going to be frustrated, if not confounded by what would occur. Circling back if I can from whatever sky hook I'm hanging from now, it's been my experience in both musics that the divergence between virtually all the formulations of what's being done/about to be done that's technically novel and what turns out to be the case in terms of key results/consequences (technically and otherwise) is at once poignant, inevitable, and crucial. Further, I've found (or think I've found) that persons such as myself (or my friends Terry Martin, Chuck Nessa, and John Litweiler), whose entire lives have been more or less defined by our experiences of jazz, have developed an accurate, well-honed, seat-of-the-pants sense (want to see my well-honed pants?) of where the actual technical-aesthetic cruxes in this music are and what their nature might be -- that is, living our lives in parallel (and/or in communion) with this music over most of our lives has of necessity educated us (and certainly not "us" alone -- it's clearly happened to many of us here) about, as I guess I've just said, "the divergence between virtually all the formulations..." etc. of how this whole shebang works itself out over time and in the present as well.

Some footnotes:

I have at least one good friend who's a talented, highly-trained professional jazz musician and a gifted writer on music (historian and critic) as well. Many times I've taken my semi-ignorant "technical" guesses/intuitions about what has been or is going in jazz in an area of what seems to me to be one that not only looks like a crux but also has so far essentially evaded useful/accurate technical description. In almost every case, my friend has told me that he thinks I'm right or close to right or at least have stumbled across something interesting -- that something crux-like was or is afoot there, that so far it's escaped or is escaping adequate description/formulation. (Again, as I said above, I've come to believe that this "escaping adequate description/formulation" process -- in both jazz and modern concert music -- is at once poignant, inevitable, and crucial; it's a big part of why the whole damn thing is "modern," right? Or to put it another way, one of things that happens quite often when I hear something in jazz or modern concert music that seems to me to be both novel and verygood is that I begin to ask myself, in the act of listening, "What IS this thing? -- What are its principles of aesthetic/technical life, and what is it telling me (and telling itself as well) in its linked quality and novelty about what all has preceded it and what is likely to come in its wake?

I have another good friend who's a talented, highly-trained professional jazz musician and who has been occupied for some years with formulating a (in his view) bold new harmonic language for jazz. When he sent me some of his current efforts a few years back, I was attracted in some ways but also dismayed by what seemed to me to be a big, arguably technical/conceptual disconnect. While his new harmonic language was elaborately and firmly in place, and while it seemed quite compatible with interesting writing and improvising (especially from my friend, who was of course steeped in his new methods), the rhythmic aspect of the music had essentially been left to take care of itself (or so it seemed) -- in any case, rhythmically the music essentially was no different than what one might hear from any mainstream modern ensemble. Further, while my friend's new harmonic language meant that any number of details within a particular piece were quite novel, all this harmonic novelty took place within quite familar overall formal frameworks -- of more or less symmetrical statement, variation, re-statement. In part this attempted union of extreme (and times quite striking) harmonic novelty with rhythmic and formal conservatism (for want of better term) was a deliberate choice on my friend's part -- he at once had a genuinely novel "technical" bug up his ass and wanted to give the jazz audience, as he conceived it, something secure to hold onto, as though a lack of such security were a key part of jazz's actual or supposed present-day "problems." As you might imagine, when we talked about all this, a fair amount of blood and guts ended up on the floor, though we're still friends and though when his recordings of some of this music finally emerged, they were more effective IMO than what I had initially heard (in part because of some choices that were made in the mixing process, perhaps because of things that I'd said, that had effects outside that realm). In any case, I mention this as a perhaps somewhat odd (in its starkness) textbook example of what can happen in jazz when actual or would-be novelty and the formulation/working out of novelty on "the plane of realization" run into each other, and what the role in all this (in this case a fairly active role) of a person such as myself almost inevitably can be. As in that old Stan Freberg sendup of Lawrence Welk, once the bubble machine starts, you can't turn it off.

I found it at:printer-friendly Gary Burton

Not sure how long this link will last as google tends to refresh pages.

Simon Weil

[Larry Kart]

Many thanks, Simon.

[clifford_thornton]

Damn, Larry, that is a long post! Er...

Anyway, glad we're back up. I have stuff to do, so cheers until later!

Thanks for all the hard work, too!

[ghost of miles]

Glad the Google search turned it up for you, Larry--I've found several things that way after they've vanished from their original posting place.

And even gladder the board is back! Pledging some $$ as soon as you get the "Donate now" button back up, Jim. It was hard not to reflexively hit my bookmark link while things were being retooled.

And congrats to Joe Milazzo--last week on Bagatellen I saw that he was getting married. Hope the bash was a swingin' one!