Grace Kelly

[clifford_thornton]

22 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

The idea that Jim was picking on Grace Kelly is absurd.

And here's an altoist who's just a few years older:
 

 

Yeah, Mazzarella is fantastic.

[ep1str0phy]

Wanted to chime in on this one. I've been largely absent from discussion in main because many of the most incendiary dialogues are (now) skirting dangerously close to my immediate peer group, which has given me a new and somewhat uncomfortable perspective on the paradigm of audience (as recipient) v. performer. Weird waking up to the notion that what I thought was casual, largely objective discussion on legendary musicians existing at a kind of remove is actual casual, largely subjective discussion about real people who you may or may not have lunch with at some point.

We've reached a weird punctuation mark in the reception of culture whereby almost every discussion seems to demand an avowal or disavowal of a certain set of political beliefs--which shouldn't read as anything new, since jazz has always involved issues of race, ethnicity, class, etc.--but I think it's beginning to have a negative impact on the broader critical discourse. I feel weird having to pull the "as a X of X" card, but as a binational person of color who is baldly preoccupied with progressive causes in my "real" life, I've begun to tune out most conversations about cultural sensitivity in jazz because they're almost invariably about introspection on the part of the interlocutors rather than anything, well, musical.

Remember when there was that gigantic Twitter kerfuffle involving Ethan Iverson and Robert Glasper? The Do the Math blog has been running interviews and essays on female musicians for months now and I've barely heard a word from social media. Not that Iverson should necessarily be congratulated for normalizing this kind of representational journalism--it's the kind of stuff that jazz should have been doing for forever now--but when you expend a ridiculous amount of social energy on dragging one guy down for his cultural transgressions--and then say more or less nothing when he attempts to fix said transgressions--then the problem has as much to do with the dialogue as it has to do with the people talking. 

This gets into even harrier territory, but as someone who can only really understand white guilt as an observer and not a participant, I'm a little taken aback at how many conversations about minority groups tend to devolve into a (rhetorical, but not necessarily literal) dick measuring contest between, to put it bluntly, self-flagellant white cis males and aggressive men's rights/white victim folks. (Just to clarify before people freak out, I'm not lumping anyone here into one group or the other--I'm describing the general tenor of a conversation I'm seeing unfold everywhere, and not just on the internet.) 

There's a place for this kind of dialogue--and it's a necessary one, I think--but this is a conversation that runs parallel to critical appraisal. You're living in a toxic environment when Jim feels the need to explain his feelings on one musician just because her cross-section of demographics is so politically charged.

All this goes to say that there's a distinction to be made between how music is received as an embodied piece of technical practice v. how music is received as representational cultural artifact. There is absolutely intersection therein but I'm frankly tiring of the mandate that we need to preface every critical conversation over, say, women in jazz with a declaration of our purposes and inclinations. If you really want to get into the conceptual nightmare of addressing the political implications of every single work of improvised music, then come strapped--let's talk about how the critical response to Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra is tied into embedded homophobia among midcentury jazz communities, or how cultural treatment of South African jazz musicians is embedded in our privileged conflation of ethnic and national identities, or how dealing with women in jazz has to do with an ethos of judging masculine-coded musical practices v. feminine-coded musical practices, etc. etc. I and many people on this board can do this all day, but to what end--and who actually benefits? 

[sgcim]

When I was in grad school for music, I was talking privately with a prof when I started going on a rant about how I thought XYZ sucked etc... He immediately got very upset, and told me to phrase my indifference in a more objective fashion.

He told me to say "XYZ's music doesn't speak to me in a special way", to voice my indifference. I'd like to say I use that approach all the time, but sometimes I lose my cool...

So if ya don't like it, DSTMIASW; if you do STMIASW. 'nuff said.

[Larry Kart]

DSTMIASW seems to me like a rather awkward way of responding to music that you don't like and that you don't like because it seems to you to have specific flaws/defects etc. -- flaws/defects. etc. that also may well, as often is the case, touch upon "problems" (if you will) that are at work in the larger musical or even social landscape. No, I'm not going to buy space on three billboards in Kansas to proclaim my dislike of musician X, but I'm not going to behave like a Trappist monk either.

[clifford_thornton]

1 hour ago, ep1str0phy said:

There's a place for this kind of dialogue--and it's a necessary one, I think--but this is a conversation that runs parallel to critical appraisal. You're living in a toxic environment when Jim feels the need to explain his feelings on one musician just because her cross-section of demographics is so politically charged.

All this goes to say that there's a distinction to be made between how music is received as an embodied piece of technical practice v. how music is received as representational cultural artifact. There is absolutely intersection therein but I'm frankly tiring of the mandate that we need to preface every critical conversation over, say, women in jazz with a declaration of our purposes and inclinations. If you really want to get into the conceptual nightmare of addressing the political implications of every single work of improvised music, then come strapped--let's talk about how the critical response to Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra is tied into embedded homophobia among midcentury jazz communities, or how cultural treatment of South African jazz musicians is embedded in our privileged conflation of ethnic and national identities, or how dealing with women in jazz has to do with an ethos of judging masculine-coded musical practices v. feminine-coded musical practices, etc. etc. I and many people on this board can do this all day, but to what end--and who actually benefits? 

yeah... agreed, but I think we cis mostly-white, somewhat straight males in the jazz peanut gallery are beginning to grasp the implicit biases in our understanding of how and why cultural work is created, and there's going to be a lot of weird pivoting until once again we can say something sucks with impunity. 

[Brad]

1 hour ago, sgcim said:

When I was in grad school for music, I was talking privately with a prof when I started going on a rant about how I thought XYZ sucked etc... He immediately got very upset, and told me to phrase my indifference in a more objective fashion.

He told me to say "XYZ's music doesn't speak to me in a special way", to voice my indifference. I'd like to say I use that approach all the time, but sometimes I lose my cool...

So if ya don't like it, DSTMIASW; if you do STMIASW. 'nuff said.

I hate to use the term but that just sounds too politically correct or overly parsing words. If you don't like something there's nothing wrong with being honest and saying so. 

[mjzee]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/we-all-live-on-campus-now.html

 

[catesta]

15 hours ago, Brad said:

I hate to use the term but that just sounds too politically correct or overly parsing words. If you don't like something there's nothing wrong with being honest and saying so. 

Exactly. Shit is getting out of hand.

[jlhoots]

Also nothing wrong to say if you do like something!!

[Peter Friedman]

21 hours ago, clifford_thornton said:

Yeah, Mazzarella is fantastic.

Mazzarella's playing is not to my taste.

Living alto players I prefer include Dmitry Baevsky and  Dave Glasser, as well as some others who have been on the scene longer such as Dick Oatts, P.J. Perry and Bob Mover.  

[BillF]

5 minutes ago, Peter Friedman said:

Mazzarella's playing is not to my taste.

Living alto players I prefer include Dmitry Baevsky and  Dave Glasser, as well as some others who have been on the scene longer such as Dick Oatts, P.J. Perry and Bob Mover.  

Some nice names there, Peter. Mike DiRubbo too?

[JSngry]

I like that Ernie Henry guy. The sound of surprise.

[Brad]

14 hours ago, mjzee said:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/we-all-live-on-campus-now.html

 

See this in today’s New York Times, https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/opinion/were-all-fascists-now.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront&referer=https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion?pagetype=Homepage&action=click&module=Opinion

32 minutes ago, Peter Friedman said:

Mazzarella's playing is not to my taste.

Living alto players I prefer include Dmitry Baevsky and  Dave Glasser, as well as some others who have been on the scene longer such as Dick Oatts, P.J. Perry and Bob Mover.  

Ditto.  His playing leaves me cold. Nothing I haven’t heard before. 

[JSngry]

I like that Otto Harwick guy. Sure, he's not alive, but what does that say about us as a people?

[mjzee]

20 minutes ago, Brad said:

See this in today’s New York Times, https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/opinion/were-all-fascists-now.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront&referer=https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion?pagetype=Homepage&action=click&module=Opinion

Yeppers.  So watch out for people who say "Well, I think it's OK, but some other people might object to your saying X."  First, let's wait until some real live in-the-flesh people actually complain.  Then, let's protect our first amendment rights and laugh them out of here.

[sgcim]

17 hours ago, Brad said:

I hate to use the term but that just sounds too politically correct or overly parsing words. If you don't like something there's nothing wrong with being honest and saying so. 

I understand that, but being honest online can cause a lot of problems for everyone concerned. One website that had a lot of 'honesty' resulted in death threats, law suits and other nastiness. Some people are convinced that their reputation as a musician hinges on what one person says about them on a web site. I savaged one person that everyone was raving about after I bought one of their records, and couldn't believe how lame it was. Sure enough, that person emailed me and begged me to delete the post, which I did.

As an example, I could say that I bought one of the alto player's records mentioned in this thread, and found that he or she couldn't play in tune and was incapable of playing a double-time idea in time, but what's the point? Maybe he or she sounded better on other records. Maybe I was in a bad mood when I heard the record. Maybe I didn't understand what he or she was doing at that time. 

As someone said about one of the alto players in this thread, "his playing doesn't appeal to my taste", which is just another way of saying DSTMIASW.

[Larry Kart]

1 hour ago, Brad said:

See this in today’s New York Times, https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/opinion/were-all-fascists-now.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront&referer=https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion?pagetype=Homepage&action=click&module=Opinion

 

And see this response from Charles Pierce:

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19177772/bari-weiss-campus-free-speech-new-york-times/

[uli]

[JSngry]

That Anthony Ortega guy too, I like him.

[Niko]

I really miss Josh Benko, a former mainstay on the SmallsLive broadcasts... nobody needs anything other than bop in principle

[JSngry]

Principle should be used to earn interest.

[Niko]

I'm teaching this stuff far too much, and what I say like at least twice a week is, "back in the 80s when there was interest, people thought that with a principle of X you could achieve whatever ..."

[Misterioso]

Guys, it's principal (not principle).

[T.D.]

2 hours ago, sgcim said:

 

...As someone said about one of the alto players in this thread, "his playing doesn't appeal to my taste", which is just another way of saying DSTMIASW.

I always use the term "not to my taste." A bit reluctantly, since the phrase sounds prissy and pretentious. However, I'm not a trained musician and can't make accurate technical criticisms, so all my opinions ultimately wind up equivalent to "well, I like/dislike it".

[AllenLowe]

On 3/6/2018 at 5:25 PM, Rooster_Ties said:

Great, but so what?  That's true of damn near everybody - isn't it?  OK, not everybody, but surely the great majority of players who are barely 25 years old.  Or 35 years old, for that matter (judging from my experience as a listener).

Why pick on her?  I mean, the criticism of her probably isn't unwarranted -- but absent the criticism of others, it does seem a bit extreme to single her out.  IMHO, of course.

EDIT:  And for that matter, there are renown jazz players who've recorded on 100's of albums -- who I feel the exact same way about.  And I could name a couple uber-fantastic players who are absolutely capable of playing inspired solos -- who have technique out the ears -- who I've heard phoning it in (live on the bandstand) more often than not.  Granted, at an incredibly high level -- but still phoning it in (at their level).

For instance, since I lived back in Kansas City for a good 10 years overlapping with him -- I can't tell you how many times I've heard none other than Bobby Watson, for instance, playing relatively tired stuff -- with incredible technical sophistication -- song after song, chorus after chorus.  I've also heard him playing his ass off too -- but the tired stuff was more the norm.  Crowd always loved it, though, because technically it was fast and admittedly fantastic.

So what if she's a shallow soloist.  That's true of 8/10 players in this world, if you ask me.

no, not of everybody; the following saxophonists soloed brilliantly in their youth: Jackie McLean, Ernie Henry, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Phil Woods, Charlie Parker, Charles McPhersone, Gene Quill, Dave Schildkraut, Casey Knudsen, Lisa Parrott, Nicole Glover, Mantana Roberts, Darius Jones - should I go on? Every one of the last bunch, contemporaries of hers, are far superior to Grace Kelly as a soloist - EVERY one. It is not even close. Really.