Just some thoughts on why I am somewhat tired of jazz

[AllenLowe]

there's a few new books and some academic thinking (if that's not an oxymoron) about whites and the roots music phenomenon of the 1960s, particularly the blues revival; it's a complicated discussion and more than I have the energy to deal with right now, but one of the things that it posits is that the white guys who created the blues revival were deluded by the apparent authenticity of the musicians they admired and rescued (eg Son House, John Hurt, et al) and tended to like them because they appeared, socially and perosnally, to be "authentic" - I happen to reject this revisionisim - as I said to Larry kart in a conversation we had last year, it's the other way around - we don't like the music because we think it's authentic, we think it's authentic because we like it - a crucial distinction, because it puts aestehtics first, the SOUND of the music and the mode of creation. So I'm weary of these new theories and dissertations, as intelligent as some of them are (Marybeth Hamilton's book on the blues is very good because it certainly isolates that part of the blues movement which should be questioned in terms of motives and methodology).

as a musician most of this relates to what I pick and choose in order to develop my own music - moving these days towards a kind of collage of sounds and trying to get the right touch on guitar, though if one has to try too hard it's likely beyond technical reach. As for Myra M., interesting, because, though it's been some time since I listened to here, I always found her blues unconvincing, as too self-consciously "rootsy," but will go back and take another listen -

Edited February 22, 2008 by AllenLowe

[Stefan Wood]

Nice discussion.

As much as I love the material from Blue Note, Riverside, Contemporary, etc., I don't listen to it as much these days. I don't know if it because I absorbed it all, or if it is just too comfortable and familiar for me. I still am excited by 60's avant jazz, 70's jazz fusion, some progressive rock, and contemporary jazz, like Nicole Michell, Hu Vibrations, Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, etc. But it can't be all one sided. I still love listening to Cuban music, Nuyorican Salsa, late Romantic classical, and as of late, my interest in African music has been revived by cds from Soundway Records, like the Ghana Afro funk compilations and the recent Nigerian 2 cd set of highlife and funk. I'll never get tired of listening to Fela and James Brown. Jazz wasn't created in a vacuum, so why should I listen to only jazz?

[John L]

It's all music and categories are really arbitrary to a large extent anyway. In my case I go through phases where I'm listening to more of one thing than another. Sometimes more R&B than Jazz, then more Brazilian than R&B, but never to the the total exclusion of ANY of them. I never think I'm going to listen to some jazz now or some rock - rather I think of an artist I want to hear. Then I'm off on a tangent for a while.

A cliche' but it's apt here. Variety is the spice of life.

That is basically the way that I feel about it as well. I often get particularly interested in devoting attention to something specific that cuts across the usual musical categories: a certain type of blues feel, a certain type of soulfulfness, a certain rhythmic drive. Whether it is "jazz" or not doesn't concern me.

[papsrus]

there's a few new books and some academic thinking (if that's not an oxymoron) about whites and the roots music phenomenon of the 1960s, particularly the blues revival; it's a complicated discussion and more than I have the energy to deal with right now, but one of the things that it posits is that the white guys who created the blues revival were deluded by the apparent authenticity of the musicians they admired and rescued (eg Son House, John Hurt, et al) and tended to like them because they appeared, socially and perosnally, to be "authentic" - I happen to reject this revisionisim - as I said to Larry kart in a conversation we had last year, it's the other way around - we don't like the music because we think it's authentic, we think it's authentic because we like it - a crucial distinction, because it puts aestehtics first, the SOUND of the music and the mode of creation. So I'm weary of these new theories and dissertations, as intelligent as some of them are (Marybeth Hamilton's book on the blues is very good because it certainly isolates that part of the blues movement which should be questioned in terms of motives and methodology).

as a musician most of this relates to what I pick and choose in order to develop my own music - moving these days towards a kind of collage of sounds and trying to get the right touch on guitar, though if one has to try too hard it's likely beyond technical reach. As for Myra M., interesting, because, though it's been some time since I listened to here, I always found her blues unconvincing, as too self-consciously "rootsy," but will go back and take another listen -

This is an interesting point of discussion. I hope seeline, Bev, MG and others have some thoughts here. The discussion of "authenticity," how the blues emerged in various parts of the United States, how it was marketed to various audiences, etc., in the first part of the last century, all tell a story about how it weaved its way into our collective consciousness. How it influenced jazz and other creative musics as well. It's relevance (or non-relevance) to musics from other parts of the world that jazz or jazz musicians have brushed up against (salsa, African musics, Middle Eastern, etc.)

I'm trying to learn about all this, really, and can't pretend to add much. I would be interested to hear more of your thoughts on Melford -- or any other musicians -- after you've had a chance to listen again. What influences you hear in her playing, etc.

[JSngry]

I also don't feel any need, as Jim does, for the music I listen to intimately reflect today's changing life, etc. I personally am pretty much stable, and as life goes on I feel I can continue to evolve without at the same time having to change my musical tastes as well, any more than my dining habits, wardrobe, address, etc. Therefore I don't feel like I'm running away from life or anything by still listening to a lot of stuff I've listened to a lot before.

That's not entirely accurate, since I do still revisit old favorites and such with vim vigor & vitality galore, but not entirely inaccurate either, since now I know I'm hearing beautiful spirits, eternal spirits, speaking eternal truths in very temporal languages. I feel blessed that I still hear/fell these languages, but it's the speaking of them that started bugging me. I've mentioned before how I was getting good, too good, at faking this "in the moment" thing, how there's a whole set of gestures that can be equated with the real thing when they are in fact just that - gestures. That started getting really weird for me as a player, and I needed to find someplace without all those "forgone conclusions". I found it, but it wasn't where or what I expected it to be, But oh well about that. That's gonna be how it works if that's what it really is, right?

Comfort, stability, all that, hey - it's really dumb to live this long and not have some of that, lots of it even. But I have a deathly fear of that spot on the pendulum swing continuing over into complacency. And that can happen, I've seen it all over the place all over they years, and I started falling into it myself. "Discovering backwards", something I've done pretty much all my life, had run its course for me, so I decided to not do that any more, jsut to see what, if anything, was there. Well hell, I've found enough "there" to keep me -or somebody with a like mind but more time & energy - busy for a good long time.

Again, it's not about "leaving" anything behind. If anything, it's about bringing it along so it don't atrophy and shit. There's so much that hasn't been done yet, but it won't/can't get done by doing the same thing only different, if you know what I mean. Which is not to say that I think it's everybody's moral obligation to keep moving when/where/if they don't want to, just that if Miles' thing was all about just vanity, then the music wouldn't have stayed as involved, intricate, and interesting as it did, even as it turned more and more into pop. Beyond vanity (and hell, when was there ever not vanity with Miles?), there's the whole notion of confronting popular culture head on, not to be "current" or anything, but to stake a claim of entitlement instead of settling for one of what for all intents and purposes ends up being involuntary marginalization (with "rewards" - and not just material ones, I'm talking respect here, and all the comfort & stability that that brings - to match).

I like that, that works for me, and that's where I'm at now. Stable like a mofo as far as what and where I've been, but not taking anything for granted, now, or hopefully ever, about where the future is going to lead, and yes - hoping, expecting it to lead somewhere other than a stationary remainder or an infinite backwards. We'll all get there soon enough!

[Shawn]

When it comes to music I'm an "obsession-ist", when something peaks my interest I have to digest ALL OF IT that I can get my hands on. I've spent the past 10 years doing that with jazz, an insatiable appetite that wouldn't be satisfied until I felt like I had a good handle on as many genres and permutations as possible. It's been a helluva ride, but that passion started to cool in the past couple years.

When you first get into this music it seems that EVERY album sounds great, I used to think that it would be near impossible to find something I really hated. But as your knowledge of the vocabulary grows, the pickier you get and albums re-visited later often end up sounding dissapointing. This has happened with a large percentage of my collection, I'll grab a disc and I'm ready to take it out after a couple tracks. It now takes me longer to find something that I actually want to hear than it would to just play an album all the way through.

Be Bop/Hard Bop/Post Bop pretty much bores the living bejesus out of me these days. I may never listen to another Freddie Hubbard album as long as I live. :-) What about jazz do I still enjoy? Quartet albums by swing-era players (Hawkins, Young, etc), Texas Tenor players, pre-bebop jazz, Ellington, mulit- instrumentalists like Yusef Lateef, Rahsaan, Jerome Richardson, etc, New Thing (Marion Brown, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Alice Coltrane), Soul Jazz and early fusion. Pretty much anything that doesn't fit into the Horace Silver/Art Blakey/Miles Quintet hard bop style...

Primarily over the past year or so I've been much more interested in re-visiting different types of stuff with "new ears". Prog rock (especially King Crimson), slow "doomy" metal (Sabbath, Trouble, Kyuss, High On Fire, Orange Goblin), blues & soul, folk, etc. I've also been on a HUGE Hendrix kick of late, finding out that your perception of him changes after listening to jazz for many years

I figure the pendulum will swing back around to jazz at some point, but after a decade of listening to jazz pretty much non-stop, it's time to give it a rest for a bit.

Edited February 24, 2008 by Shawn

[paul secor]

there's a few new books and some academic thinking (if that's not an oxymoron) about whites and the roots music phenomenon of the 1960s, particularly the blues revival; it's a complicated discussion and more than I have the energy to deal with right now, but one of the things that it posits is that the white guys who created the blues revival were deluded by the apparent authenticity of the musicians they admired and rescued (eg Son House, John Hurt, et al) and tended to like them because they appeared, socially and perosnally, to be "authentic" - I happen to reject this revisionisim - as I said to Larry kart in a conversation we had last year, it's the other way around - we don't like the music because we think it's authentic, we think it's authentic because we like it - a crucial distinction, because it puts aestehtics first, the SOUND of the music and the mode of creation. So I'm weary of these new theories and dissertations, as intelligent as some of them are (Marybeth Hamilton's book on the blues is very good because it certainly isolates that part of the blues movement which should be questioned in terms of motives and methodology).

as a musician most of this relates to what I pick and choose in order to develop my own music - moving these days towards a kind of collage of sounds and trying to get the right touch on guitar, though if one has to try too hard it's likely beyond technical reach. As for Myra M., interesting, because, though it's been some time since I listened to here, I always found her blues unconvincing, as too self-consciously "rootsy," but will go back and take another listen -

Allen - a question: What do you mean by "authentic"?

[Dan Gould]

I always thought it meant if you wear coveralls or jeans on stage, you were considered 'authentic' to that crowd, but if you dressed in a suit like B.B., you weren't.

Edited February 22, 2008 by Dan Gould

[seeline]

This is an interesting point of discussion. I hope seeline, Bev, MG and others have some thoughts here. The discussion of "authenticity," how the blues emerged in various parts of the United States, how it was marketed to various audiences, etc., in the first part of the last century, all tell a story about how it weaved its way into our collective consciousness. How it influenced jazz and other creative musics as well. It's relevance (or non-relevance) to musics from other parts of the world that jazz or jazz musicians have brushed up against (salsa, African musics, Middle Eastern, etc.)

Oh... I am so not ready to talk about anything re. the blues and "authenticity" at this point! have mercy, papsrus! (I'm only half-joking.)

[Noj]

Like BeBop and Lon, diversification has helped me from burning out on any one genre. However, I haven't been listening to music for nearly as long as you guys. Recently I have found myself annoyed with my music collection, stuck in a rut and playing the same stuff too much--not exploring what I already have enough.

Noj, I've mentioned this in the distant past, but since no one is expected to remember what everyone says, I'll repeat it...

I "explore what I already have" by starting each New Year with the resolution to listen to all of my CDs at least once in the calendar year. For the first time in a number of years, in 2007 I actually did it.

Here's my method: I do not shelve my CDs in alphabetical order. I keep one shelf separate for the CDs opened in the past twelve months. They get by far the most play.

All of my other CDs, regardless of genre, I keep together. There is no order except one - I place the CD I have just listened to at the end of the top shelf. When that shelf is filled up, I slide all of my CDs down to make the top shelf empty again.

I call this the LIFO method (for the accounting term "last in, first out").

Because there is no order except that of having been played, I sometimes cannot find a CD I am looking for. But that doesn't happen very often.

The benefit of this system is that I know right where to go to find the CDs I haven't listened to in a long time. They are on the bottom shelf.

I believe that my habitual browsing of the bottom shelf keeps me from getting burned out on my collection.

And I often hear things in a record that I hadn't noticed before when hearing something for the first time in many months!

edit for typo

Damn! Looks like I wasted a Sunday putting everything in alphabetical order. Effective technique, thanks for the suggestion, Russ. I'm currently finishing up an Excel spread sheet of all my music, I found it helped to refresh my memory of what I have just by going through everything again. Found myself reaching for some discs I'd completely forgotten acquiring!

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

there's a few new books and some academic thinking (if that's not an oxymoron) about whites and the roots music phenomenon of the 1960s, particularly the blues revival; it's a complicated discussion and more than I have the energy to deal with right now, but one of the things that it posits is that the white guys who created the blues revival were deluded by the apparent authenticity of the musicians they admired and rescued (eg Son House, John Hurt, et al) and tended to like them because they appeared, socially and perosnally, to be "authentic" - I happen to reject this revisionisim - as I said to Larry kart in a conversation we had last year, it's the other way around - we don't like the music because we think it's authentic, we think it's authentic because we like it - a crucial distinction, because it puts aestehtics first, the SOUND of the music and the mode of creation. So I'm weary of these new theories and dissertations, as intelligent as some of them are (Marybeth Hamilton's book on the blues is very good because it certainly isolates that part of the blues movement which should be questioned in terms of motives and methodology).

as a musician most of this relates to what I pick and choose in order to develop my own music - moving these days towards a kind of collage of sounds and trying to get the right touch on guitar, though if one has to try too hard it's likely beyond technical reach. As for Myra M., interesting, because, though it's been some time since I listened to here, I always found her blues unconvincing, as too self-consciously "rootsy," but will go back and take another listen -

Allen - a question: What do you mean by "authentic"?

Yeah, that's my question, too. But perhaps more to the point is what does whoever Allen's reading mean by it?

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Oh... I am so not ready to talk about anything re. the blues and "authenticity" at this point! have mercy, papsrus! (I'm only half-joking.)

A couple or three years ago, on AAJ, you posted a link to some site on which there were results from some research about the variety of material people like Mississippi John Hurt and others normally performed. I never saved it, to my regret. Could you post it here, please? I have the feeling it might be somewhat relevant.

MG

[seeline]

Was it the interview with Elijah Wald on Afropop.org, maybe? If so, here it is.

Judging from the reactions to Wald elsewhere [clears throat], he's Satan's son-in-law, or something like that.

Edit: I'm completely serious about not wanting to slug it out with anyone who thinks Wald is a crazy revisionist or worse. Been there, done that already. It was exhausting.

Edit edit: Wald references the Fisk U. study of music and listeners in Coahoma Co. MI, done in 1941 (somewhat in conjunction with Alan Lomax's 1st trip to the Delta). What the Fisk people found is very revealing; includes lists of peoples' fave songs, lists of what was on all the jukeboxes in the area, etc. etc. (Plus many trenchant comments from older interview subjects about the blues being some kind of newfangled thing that ran the older, nicer music out of town - a paraphrase, but it's very close to several of the quotes cited in Wald's book.) i really need to get my hands on a copy of the Fisk study. (which I promised myself I would do, back in January of this year.)

Edited February 22, 2008 by seeline

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Was it the interview with Elijah Wald on Afropop.org, maybe? If so, here it is.

Judging from the reactions to Wald elsewhere [clears throat], he's Satan's son-in-law, or something like that.

Edit: I'm completely serious about not wanting to slug it out with anyone who thinks Wald is a crazy revisionist or worse. Been there, done that already. It was exhausting.

Edit edit: Wald references the Fisk U. study of music and listeners in Coahoma Co. MI, done in 1941 (somewhat in conjunction with Alan Lomax's 1st trip to the Delta). What the Fisk people found is very revealing; includes lists of peoples' fave songs, lists of what was on all the jukeboxes in the area, etc. etc. (Plus many trenchant comments from older interview subjects about the blues being some kind of newfangled thing that ran the older, nicer music out of town - a paraphrase, but it's very close to several of the quotes cited in Wald's book.) i really need to get my hands on a copy of the Fisk study. (which I promised myself I would do, back in January of this year.)

That's it; thanks Seeline. Now I've reread it, it sounds like the opposite to what Allen's saying, I think.

MG

[AllenLowe]

well, these are loaded questions, and I will answer them quickly and imperfectly....what is generally meant by authentic tends, I think, to be socially derived - that the person who is making the music is making it from earned experience, that the music reflects the verifiable reality of the person and not some imagined or invented reality -

I don't agree with all of the implications of the above, but I think that that is what is GENERALLY meant by the term - and my counterpoint to those who put down the blues revival white guys is relative to what I said before - that they did not like the music because they thought it was authentic, they thought it was authentic because they liked it, because it spoke to some deep well of life and experience and personal consciousness - and then I would give a deeper definition of authenticity, as something that derives from true personal consciousness, from an awareness of deep levels of life and thought and that is created out of expressive necessity; it involves experience and imagination and thought and feeling and even commercially derived ideas of popularity and distribution, even though it, itself, may remain obscure.

my problem with some of the revisionist thinking which worries about sales and statistics is that, using the same standards, someone writing, say, 50 years from now, a history of 21st century jazz might, using these criteria, put prime emphasis on Kenny G; to me, what constitutes the history of an art form is not sales and popularity but strength of expression and, (only incidentally sometimes) influence, and how such expression weaves itself through the production and/or distribution of that art from - we see the picture of the history of the art by looking at what people have done with its forms, regardless of recognition or earnings. These expressions often make up complicated connections of culture and subculture, personality and commerce. So Son House, who maybe sold 18 records in his lifetime - well, his slide style and his singing influenced Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and THEY influenced countless others - either directly or through the creation of a sounds that permeated the music by way of records and juke joints and dances and informal singing -

Edited February 22, 2008 by AllenLowe

[7/4]

Without addressing all the issues already raised in this thread,

I should go back and read it in more detail...

I listen to all sorts of music, so I don't get tired of any one style. Too much to listen to, not enough time.

[papsrus]

That is a fascinating article Seeline. Thanks for posting the link here. This is the comment from the interview that I was thinking of in my earlier post:

NS: Is it possible that we run the danger by fetishizing the word "blues" of losing sight of the fact that there is this musical essence that goes back in time?

EW: All of that music that we now call blues - it has roots in the South, it has roots that go back to the slave period, it has roots that go back to Africa. But if you interviewed anybody who was living in Mississippi in 1910 and 1920, and asked them when they first heard blues, at that time, those people, that generation, they did not talk about their parents in the fields, or their grandparents. They talked about the blues arriving on records by people like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. You talk to Son House, who taught Robert Johnson, and he says, "When I was growin' up, wasn't nothin' pertainin' to no blues." Blues came in from the north, on records. Now that doesn't mean it didn't have lots of roots in the older music. But it was a new, hot pop style. And you actually talk to older musicians down there, they talk about how blues ruined the nice old music. How "We used to have all these pretty dance tunes, and then that blues came in and wiped it all out."

The interview makes clear that blacks in the South played the blues because it was a popular music, not necessarily because it came from their life experiences. It was a style also, according to Wald, somewhat dictated by the record companies. Blacks would play the blues, whites would play country music. ... So as far as "authenticity" goes, one is left to wonder. Certainly there seems to have been a commercial component to how the blues emerged, and that it played no small part.

[AllenLowe]

"You talk to Son House, who taught Robert Johnson, and he says, "When I was growin' up, wasn't nothin' pertainin' to no blues." Blues came in from the north, on records. Now that doesn't mean it didn't have lots of roots in the older music. But it was a new, hot pop style. And you actually talk to older musicians down there, they talk about how blues ruined the nice old music. How "We used to have all these pretty dance tunes, and then that blues came in and wiped it all out."

sorry, but this is really WAY oversimplfied about the blues - borderline BS, pardon me for saying. The recollecttions of House are MUCH more complicated - those don't even strike me as real quotes - let's get a citation; I honestly don't belive it - there is some truth, but it is WAY oversimplified in that statement -

the origins of the blues are way more complicated than this as well - don't take that interview seriously, please - read Howard Odum first, if you must -

[seeline]

I will say that when "authenticity" is the main goal, it seems to be very much about the listener's experience *of* the music, as opposed to *the music itself - and the people who create it.* I think that's equally true of the approach many ethnomus types take in trying to understand music from other cultures, too.

The quotes in question address some aspects of this, though certainly not all.

[/end threadjack]

Edited February 22, 2008 by seeline

[papsrus]

"You talk to Son House, who taught Robert Johnson, and he says, "When I was growin' up, wasn't nothin' pertainin' to no blues." Blues came in from the north, on records. Now that doesn't mean it didn't have lots of roots in the older music. But it was a new, hot pop style. And you actually talk to older musicians down there, they talk about how blues ruined the nice old music. How "We used to have all these pretty dance tunes, and then that blues came in and wiped it all out."

sorry, but this is really WAY oversimplfied about the blues - borderline BS, pardon me for saying. The recollecttions of House are MUCH more complicated - those don't even strike me as real quotes - let's get a citation; I honestly don't belive it - there is some truth, but it is WAY oversimplified in that statement -

the origins of the blues are way more complicated than this as well - don't take that interview seriously, please - read Howard Odum first, if you must -

Yeah, I didn't mean to stir up a hornet's nest. I expect the truth lies somewhere in the middle. But I don't see Wald's comments as incompatible with your own statement to the effect that we confer authenticity on music because we like the music. How much have we romanticized the blues? Commercial success drove the music in the early part of the last century, you'd agree. And I don't think this is surprising or controversial at all. But I'd defer to you and others on how much of an oversimplification that might be.

Odum's "The Negro and His Songs," btw, is quite expensive over at amazon, at least. This is a title you'd recommend?

[JSngry]

That's another things I've gotten tired of - "blues" & "song form", at least as "format" (and that word alone implies a bit of utilitarian exploitation of something Bigger & Better, doesn't it?). The former is so primal an impulse that, like the Old Testament edict against speaking the name of g-d, thinking of of it "as "blues" these days seems to automatically create a three-dimensional constraint for something that is really omniversal. The latter was in large part created as a commerce-friendly format, and if some people found a way to make "art" in it, that's all well and good, but...the need for "attractive presentations" of constructed representations still exists, but "repetitive & linear" is pretty much not gonna do much these days except offer The Comfort Of Days Gone By, while meanwhile bandits galore will thrive on the distraction & gleefully pick our mental & spiritual (and literal) pockets clean until one day we wake up no longer knowing or even having a reasonably good guess as to what or where "here" is. Exceptions still exist, to be sure, but I'm just sayin'....

It's all good in theory, but if we can actually manipulate these forms "politically", then that tells me that the Once Omnipotent Goddess has been tamed and is now a Whore In Waiting - or worse. Real Music, like Real Life cannot be tamed. Channeled, focused, directed, etc. yeah, sure. But tamed & pimped out? Uh-uh. Never.

The good news is that The Goddess, knowing what her fate was to be, had a baby or two beforehand & put them in some baskets in some marshes here and there. So be prepared!

[JSngry]

But on the other hand, if I ever fail to get a spiritual hardon from Lockjaw Davis, it's time to check out.

So its not all black and white, even though it is.

Nobody said that omnidimensional reality was gonna be easy. :g :g

[Christiern]

I wondered where this misinformation came from, then I saw that it wasn't something made up by Phil Schaap--it was Elijah Wald. That explained everything.

Addendum: I just read the entire interview w. Wald--a lot of BS there.

Edited February 22, 2008 by Christiern

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

well, these are loaded questions, and I will answer them quickly and imperfectly....what is generally meant by authentic tends, I think, to be socially derived - that the person who is making the music is making it from earned experience, that the music reflects the verifiable reality of the person and not some imagined or invented reality -

I don't agree with all of the implications of the above, but I think that that is what is GENERALLY meant by the term - and my counterpoint to those who put down the blues revival white guys is relative to what I said before - that they did not like the music because they thought it was authentic, they thought it was authentic because they liked it, because it spoke to some deep well of life and experience and personal consciousness - and then I would give a deeper definition of authenticity, as something that derives from true personal consciousness, from an awareness of deep levels of life and thought and that is created out of expressive necessity; it involves experience and imagination and thought and feeling and even commercially derived ideas of popularity and distribution, even though it, itself, may remain obscure.

my problem with some of the revisionist thinking which worries about sales and statistics is that, using the same standards, someone writing, say, 50 years from now, a history of 21st century jazz might, using these criteria, put prime emphasis on Kenny G; to me, what constitutes the history of an art form is not sales and popularity but strength of expression and, (only incidentally sometimes) influence, and how such expression weaves itself through the production and/or distribution of that art from - we see the picture of the history of the art by looking at what people have done with its forms, regardless of recognition or earnings. These expressions often make up complicated connections of culture and subculture, personality and commerce. So Son House, who maybe sold 18 records in his lifetime - well, his slide style and his singing influenced Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and THEY influenced countless others - either directly or through the creation of a sounds that permeated the music by way of records and juke joints and dances and informal singing -

Thanks Allen.

I agree with your view thus far

that they did not like the music because they thought it was authentic, they thought it was authentic because they liked it,

But the next bit is, I think, somewhat over-charitable. I'd go on to say, "because it was obscure." At least, it was obscure considering the state of knowledge about these things in Britain at the time. There is a very great attraction in the obscure. It allows the "discoverer" of the obscurity to "claim" some kind of hip superiority over those not "in the know". And there was a hell of a lot of that around at the time. (Oh, and I was doing it, too - just as bad as the rest ) But of course, it's nonetheless true that it did speak

to some deep well of life and experience and personal consciousness

. But I don't believe - and here I'm speaking from memory of how I felt at the time, because I can't tell how Jagger, Baldry, Clapton etc really felt - that this was what made it seem authentic. There was much other music around that conveyed the same feelings of excitement and self-recognition equally as well as the blues singers who were influential in those circles - and that music wasn't anything like obscure. When Jagger and Baldry did a duet with the Alexis Korner band on "I got a woman" they were (all) acting as if what they were doing was a slightly naff, slightly joky, concession to popular taste; not "the real thing". And yet they were clearly enjoying it greatly and inspired by it. But Soul and even proto-Soul were not obscure enough to be "authentic", even though it was music that grabbed them as it grabbed me.

MG

[zen archer]

I don't listen to jazz everyday of the year , my listening goes in cycles . Last year from July

to December i was on a country binge. Dwight Yoakam , Marty Stuart, Vince gill and Ricky Scaggs (Damn can he play!)

Also the new female country artists are fantastic ,while everyone is jumping on the Amy Winehype bandwagon

your missing out on Miranda Lambert who IMHO put out the best album of 07 .

At the beginning of this year i got on a Zappa binge ( how did i go from country to Zappa?) after i tortured my

wife for a month Zappa led me back into jazz .......and the beat goes on ..who said that ?