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Final Appeal Through Indie Gogo Recording Project


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One thing that amused me as we prepared for the session was that Ursula Oppens, who has had pieces written for her by Elliot Carter and Conlon Nancarrow, and who has performed at the behest of people like Morton Feldman, requested that I demo the little piano piece that I had written for her (called Crazy Dog) - needless to say she had nothing to worry about, and performed, as well, a stunning little improv of her own after the theme statement (she had improvised before, but was unaccustomed to working with jazz musicians). She's a great artist and wonderful lady.

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Edited by Son-of-a-Weizen
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1) Moms - for some reason I can't see anything on my screen that you've posted -

2) we exhumed the sax player just for the session, then put a stake through his heart and buried him again

3) this is not the actual original Jim Crow, but based on my idea of that piece (see below) -

my liner notes to this (there are two separate versions that will be on the CD):

Jim Crow Variations – The ties of jazz, not to mention all of American vernacular music, to dance are, of course, well known and amply documented. Of particular interest in this respect is Jelly Roll Morton's Library of Congress lecture/demonstration on Tiger Rag. Morton demos Tiger Rag as something that came out of the old-time Quadrille, a dance which had, in its outline, a 19th century, parlor-formal gravity. Through his auspices and under questioning by Alan Lomax, we hear, on these Library of Congress recordings, Tiger Rag morph into something both very different and yet quite the same - dance music that starts to swing and gradually become jazz, yet which retains certain old-time gestures of rhythm and melody. This is the American vernacular in action, as something actively engaged in both transformation and reaffirmation, a conservative impulse overwhelmed by the idea of cultural progress. Significantly, it is also a precious piece of the 19th century prehistory of American pop.

The same thing may be said of a song written by the great Black entertainer Ernest Hogan, about whom we shall hear elsewhere in this project: Pas Ma La, which he wrote, was a substantial hit in his time (he lived from 1865-1909)and embodies a similar old time fusion, of early swing as shackled to classic, parlor-like politeness, with (more than) a hint of populist-dance lilt.

Jump Jim Crow, my model here, has a similar lineage: long before it became part of the phraseology of Southern institutionalized racism, it was a fiddle tune which had a clear relationship to much of the above: 19th century dance music as an emerging and indigenous domestic style of expression and swing.

Hence my composition of Jim Crow Variations, in which I attempt to fuse a diatonic melodic classicism with an inference of chromatic dissonance. This is polite music as somewhat dismantled by Ray Suhy and Matthew Shipp and then reassembled into the final theme.

Edited by AllenLowe
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re. the Big Joe Williams video posted by MomsMobley - fantastic stuff (don't think I ever heard him sound so rock n roll - almost like Arthur Crudup with the drum & bass). The hard to find book on him by Mike Bloomfield was recently made available on the net as a pdf here though I must admit it made me feel a big queasy..

talking of Jelly Roll Morton, Jim Crow Variations made me think a little of Charles Mingus' Jelly Roll things..

What an amazing session that was with Morton & Lomax, 'My Gal Sal' is my favourite transformation that he does 'live'. I'm reading the John Szwed book on Lomax at the mo (which i know you've all read..) & it's very interesting on that session.

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