Good blog;thanks.

I read all the Tristano stuff and the Oscar Peterson article. And more

Crikey. I'm only a little ways into Part One of the Wynton Marsalis interview and my mind is officially blown. Nice one.

Okay, now I'm into the post-interview essays and I can already tell they're going to be really annoying. ("American popular music since 1955" and modernist and minimalist "classical music" should be identified with "jazz" so people have places to play? Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Eric Dolphy and Jack DeJohnette wouldn't fit Marsalis' definition of jazz? Or no, wait, the "impression" he gives of his definition of jazz? What?)

Still, interesting blog.

Okay, see, there it is again, in the "Young Lions" post: There also seemed to be a chauvinistic, blatant disregard for most older white innovators like Paul Bley, Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh . . . most of the disregard I've seen has come from the other direction (and you have to admit, there's a certain force to Jarrett's critique of Marsalis as being a talented imitator of other people's styles rather than someone who's developed his own voice). But Jesus fuck, the "free jazz" players/aficionados always seem to come off as a painfully insecure bunch.

Anyone who calls Paul Bley or Lee Konitz or Pat Metheny jazz might as well just put on a hood & burn a cross.

That's a joke. Mostly.

Pretty much any era of jazz after about 1940 can be accused of being "not really jazz". I don't think that the point's worth arguing. You can always say, "I like jazz, and maybe X isn't really jazz but I like it too, and Y is really jazz and it doesn't do anything for me." For example, Jan Garbarek has never been jazz, but his mosuic is improvised with jazz instrumentation. With a lot of contemporary traditional jazz I have the feel that it's already been done. (People were saying that about white "Dixieland" groups already in 1950, and with big-band jazz not too long after that.)

There's this space in between classical, roots music of various sorts, and commercial pop that you have to call something.

"already in 1940"....

I do think there's this tendency among young jazz musicians to treat the word "jazz" like it's some kind of honorific rather than a descriptor and to assume that calling something not-jazz is an insult... because that's the way they think.

Pat Metheny of course does stuff other than jazz. But I think it's absurd to say that Marsalis wouldn't define the Metheny trio, Konitz or Bley as jazz, whether or not he would think they're especially good jazz. Or I don't know, maybe the "young lion" Marsalis of the Eighties would have been brasher about things, but it certainly doesn't fit with WM's subsequent evolution or with the guy that emerges in those interviews. It almost seems like the Bad Plus guy got this amazing, involved six-hour interview with WM and pissed it away, like he just wasn't listening or couldn't be bothered to modify his essays in light of what he heard.

I believe it was Duke Ellington that said "There are two types of music in this world, good music and bad music. I like the good music."

I think that a case could be made that Duke Ellinton was "not really jazz", but it's not there on Google.

Sarah Palin and the Duke Ellington band. Just popped up in my Google.

The author decided to pick a date of 1984 (some 30 years in the future) and asked a lot of jazz musicians what they thought jazz would be like at that time. Bear in mind that this projection was for twelve years ago. Duke Ellington said, "nobody's going to worry about whether it's jazz, symphony, boogie-woogie, or folk music. The categories will be abolished." He added, "I'm often accused of not being myself, when somebody hears a record of something I wrote in 1927 and they come back in 1957 and expect me to be writing the same thing." He was asked if he thought the 12-bar harmonic pattern for the blues would still be played the same way. His reply, "Yes, I think so because the blues hasn't shown any weakness yet - that's America. You know how thin the line is between jazz and other music already. Twenty-five years from now it's just going to be that much more so. Just one big music, with everybody believing exactly what I've always believed -- that if it sounds good, then it's good music."

Good music, and the other kind. I love that Ellington quote.

Awhile back I listened to a lot of the early electric guitar players in various styles, and they were all pretty eclectic. They mostly grew up in the boonies and played all different kinds of music. (Les Paul seems to have had really crappy musical taste, but eclectic). When I first heard T-Bone Walker, it was pretty jazzy and poppy even though it was classified blues, and I thought that he was trying to upscale the blues and make it respectable. But actually he was one of the first, came before the Chicago electric blues players. He was just playing what he played. One biographer concluded that he was just too classy for the 50s.

Maybe Wynton Marsalis has evolved, but I'm not ready to forgive him for the relentless crap of the previous twenty years. Last time I listened seriously to his words was in the 90's, and he was still bragging about how he'd harassed Miles Davis on his deathbed for "abandoning jazz." If he publicly recants, does some penance, and records a Don Cherry tribute album, then I'll consider taking him seriously.

Woo Twin Cities! Also, the Tears for Fears song on Prog is awesome. Can't wait for the new album.

I am still sad that I lost my poster from when Dizzy Gillespie played at UVa.

Hey, Chopper, you were supposed to be gloating here after the football game.

But you're right, ben, it's a great blog. Thanks for posting it during a school break when I can read and click links with much less guilt.

(Lost my damn connection, so probably pwnd, and I probably shouldn't be commenting, since I am lazy and stupid, and have listening to the whitest music ever for five years)

6:Ummm

!) I know nuttin, nuttin about music.

2) There may be some point about music(art) being reflective of socio-political conditions, or even uh leading (?) socio-political changes.

Ayler, Trane, Rollins, Dexter Gordon in the early 60s vs The Miles Quintet and the MJQ, was I think, to some extent, political.

And then there are more purely artistic disputes that may or may not have political implications. Tristano preferring Navarro to Diz, or Miles implying that Peterson wouldn't/couldn't play ensemble improvisation.

With race-in-America involved, it is of course a minefield. I should probably just go:"Whatever Stanley Crouch says" and STFU.

12:T-Bone Walker was a demigod, but then, he was a Texan.

Look, "good music or bad music?" Sure in one sense on one level.

On another level, every-fucking-thing is political. I completely depend on you academic types to tell me whether Buffy is more subtly fascist than 24 (maybe just season 6?).

No John, I won't use the word "superstructure" I promised.

I got these 15,999 impressionist jpgs rotating as wallpaper and every time a Renoir mother-and-child comes up I think of Cassatt & Morisot and try to see the sexist pig within the pastels.

Doesn't everybody live their lives in meta-analysis?

18 - why on earth would Stanley motherfucking Crouch be the right person to navigate America's racial minefield?

No pause-play signs here, because when I say this:

No more masturbating to Freddie Hubbard.

...it's sadly quite on-topic.

The fascism in season 6 was way too subtle for me.

20:See? I'm in big trouble already.

Yup, I'ma getcha, bob.

16: Couldn't. I was in South Dakota without an internet connection, enduring the holiday visit with the family.

But who wants to gloat about eeking out a victory agains the other team's second string? If we beat Phillie next week, maybe then I'll start to gloat. But I doubt it. The Vikings have let me down too many times.

Same here, Chopper. I haven't watched a game yet. But next week!

13: Marsalis did and said some stupid things in his twenties, but so did most people, emphatically including Davis.

And he may have been wrong in dismissing Davis' fusion stuff as not "true jazz," but frankly he was right that it was far from the man's best work (just as Davis was right, to an extent, to accuse Marsalis at the time of recycling sterile nostalgia). Someone who hasn't listened to anything Marsalis did or said since would have an excuse (sort of) to still be interpreting him according to this or that remark he made in the Eighties, but the guy who just interviewed him certainly doesn't.

As for taking Marsalis seriously, the days when he could be accused of merely imitating others' renditions of the standards are long past (Harry Connick, Jr. and Diana Krall have much more to answer for in terms of recycling nostalgia). IMO he's a better classical player than he is a jazz player and probably always will be, but there's just no fucking with (for example) that Congo Square album they spend the first half of the interview discussing.

Speaking of music, I just discovered this piece of Cold War nostalgia and very much loved it.

Whatever the fusion stuff was, I like it better than anything he did before that. But I can see that if "Kind of Blue" or something earlier was your standard, you'd hate it.

The stuff in between doesn't strike me as especially jazzy either, "Miles in the Sky", etc., or the Gil Evans stuff.

DS is just being defensive because he's blackCanadian.

Marsalis probably is, or was, an anachronism. Or nostalgic.

And caveat, I know not much about jazz 45-65, even less 65-75, haven't a clue what Anthony Braxton was about, and barely know a name after early Braxton.

But. Whatever the divisions and fights and resolutions were in the 60s world of jazz and black music (said fights going all the fucking way back to Armstrong vs Paul Whiteman whatever but peaking in a very positive progressive way around 1960) they were as important as all the other changes (New Left, Nouvelle Vague. etc) and are just another mode in which to study the way late capitalism/neo-liberalism has slowly turned everything everywhere since 1968 into runny yellow baby poop.

Let me see, Tokyo Story and L'Eclisse on the one hand, and Ironman and Wolverine:Origins on the other hand. Time has passed me by, I spose.

I'm just funning y'all. Really.

It would be insensitive to make a sex-with-bears joke.

The Gil Evans stuff is a perfect example of why arguing over whether something is "really jazz" can be so pointless; who cares if it's "jazz" or not, it's just awesome music.

Kind of Blue Davis and Bitches Brew Davis are equally awesome. It's the last decade of his output that loses me.

29 pretty much describes me, except, as a rock/prog fan, I like the early electric stuff. Or maybe because that was the music of my youth.

Birth of the Cool, Porgy? No
Steamin, Working, etc? Perfection
Wayne Shorter listened to too much Konitz, Hancock too much Tristano and Peterson. 2nd quintet? No.

I keep meaing to reload all my jazz, but I just can't abandon the roots of twee until I have completely deconstructed it.

So if Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew are equally awesome, but Davis' fusiony stuff is far from his best, then Kind of Blue is far from his best, also? DS is staking out some controversial territory.

Anybody looking for a job? Ben?

32: We take sex with bears very seriously.

The whole technical discussion about rhythm he has with Marsalis is freaking great, really; one of the things I like about WM is that he's an amazing educator about music (one of the advantages of being an anachronism). And it's a good conversation they have about music in general. Just a shame the guy didn't incorporate that better into his other essays.

35 makes no sense.

I assume DS meant things like Doobop, "True Colors," etc. Which no right-thinking person likes much, either. But Marsalis was a total asshat for taunting the man about it, in the fashion he did at the time he did, and to my knowledge he's never like, apologized. Maybe he's said smarter stuff since the 90s, I don't know - I'm generally on the side of the AACM types the Bad Plus blog refers to, generally hating on the whole JALC concept and it's outputs.

I said dumb shit in my 20s, but fortunately nobody really listened. Davis actually said a lot of great shit in his 20s (although he did commit acts of violence against women, for which he should not be forgiven in spite of his genius). Marsalis' dumb shit has been influential at an institutional and pop-cultural level that takes it beyond mere offensive commentary. Doesn't mean he isn't a fine player, or even composer, but his influence on contemporary jazz music and the public's perception thereof is noxious.

"why arguing over whether something is "really jazz" can be so pointless; who cares if it's "jazz" or not, it's just awesome music."

The point, as I said above, is really about whether Ayler, Rollins, Monk, Gordon, etc and the greatest fucking musical artist of all fucking time, John Coltrane, were in some way making a political statement with their music. "The meaning of Jazz", whatever that meant or means, is a shorthand for that political expression.

"My Favorite Things" is a fucking statement.

Oh, right, because Bitches Brew is fusion. No, it's the Eighties fusion-y stuff that was less than stellar, not Bitches Brew and Live Evil & c.

Regarding jazz and sex with bears, I quite liked this when I read it years back.

40 - in spite of your disclaimers, you're actually right on about this. Which is why these fights were/are so firey, as they don't reduce to simple aesthetic preferences. Since I'm linking a lot today, here's my favorite book on this subject.

This thread is making the trolls say funny things.

And the funny thing is, and it is just a little before my time, was that everyone understood at the time of Coltrane and Rauschenberg & Godard the importance of form as political expression & liberation.

You can't use the neo-liberal tools, tropes, structures to overcome neo-liberalism. It will eat you.

I certainly don't deny that there remain smart people around who still understand this. Especially the feminists. But it feels nostalgic and despairing.

43:Jeez, how could I forget Ornette Coleman.

I am outa here.

39.2: On the whole, Marsalis has worked pretty hard at upping popular consciousness of the older forms and why they were good. And, well, someone ought to be; Bad Plus dude is right that there's an alarming sort of illiteracy going on when you wind up in a room full of jazz pianists who've never heard of James P. Johnson. And I don't see how it's "noxious" for WM to have put in the time to promote and play the music he likes and connects with. It's not the guy's job to like everything and be everybody's ambassador.

As for how jazz signifies politically, sure it does, lots of musical forms do. Sketches of Spain was surely a political act regardless of its status as jazz or non-jazz, or rather specifically because of that indeterminacy.

That book in 42 looks awesome.

Agreed, the fusion stuff Davis did after his comeback was sad. "Tutu" was pretty good, but didn't seem like there was much Davis in it.

I tried to go see the Bad Plus at yoshis but they had sold out. I hardly ever go to a concert without buying tickets first.

this is a negative review:

"Black talk" of course is black music is babble - oral/aural vs. white (Western Civilization) "linear semantics" as the author demonstrates several very un-hip times per page of this hodgepodge study of the relationship between music and nearly everything else in Black America from slavery on up, up, up. Sentences like "They had already accepted the oral orientation of nonanalysis and were learning how to apply the concept of actionality" abound as the author uses repetition and sociological gobbledygook to reconcile contradictions (he'd call it dialecticism) to arrive at the tautological center where anything goes. Every overworked culture hero from Marshall McLuhan to Ludwig Wittgenstein (not to mention Stokeley and Abbie) puts in at least a brief appearance in a vain attempt to lend erudition to what is essentially a slight history of the development of jazz, weak on soul, rhythm-and-blues, and nearly everything else. (Kirkus Reviews)

40.3: What's the statement?

46. The new way to say that, Bob, is "but, my cows".

So bear-fucking novels are genre fiction in Canadia?

53: "Bear-fucking fiction" or BFF for short. Hell, I'm working on one myself, the story of a Grizzly who goes out east to play the clarinet in the mining-town jazz bands of northern Ontario in the Twenties and finds true love with an amputee prostitute. It's a classic in the making.

New wave Alphorn will become swipple.

There was a cool video just now of a polar bear chasing a guy around his car. It didn't look like he was after sex to me, but then, I'm not a Canadian.

If it was sex he was after, the foreplay was very rough.

unlike William Kotzwinkle's recent The Bear Went Over the Mountain (LJ 6/1/96), which plays the "bear about town" scenario for laughs, first novelist Zabor asks us to take the bear's odyssey fairly seriously, expecting us to accept the bear in these situations as easily as the book's characters do. This is a shame, because Zabor's scenes of musical life are vivid and knowledgeable, and his dialog is uniformly excellent; adding that talking bear seems gimmicky and at odds with the effective reality of the work. With all this strong material, one wonders why the main character is a bear.

These are the fundamental issues that all bear-based fiction must grapple with. The choices will determine whether the author has produced a lasting classic in the talking bear genre, or just another also-ran.

everyone understood at the time of Coltrane and Rauschenberg & Godard the importance of form as political expression & liberation. You can't use the neo-liberal tools, tropes, structures to overcome neo-liberalism. It will eat you.

Bill Clinton tried to use the saxophone to overcome neoliberalism. Then he moved on to public sexual theatre. But in spite of his use of these radical forms, he failed, and neo-liberalism ate him. Tragic.

56: Habitat destruction has led to an upsurge in the popularity of S&M among polar bears, so you never know.

adding that talking bear seems gimmicky and at odds with the effective reality of the work.

That reviewer is clearly an amateur. Any true aficionado of anthro-ursine literature knows you don't try to explain the talking bear. The absurdity of the talking bear is the whole point of the talking bear.

Realistic talking bear fiction is a different genre entirely. It's surprising that the guy didn't understand that.

I freaking love Kind of Blue, Birth of the Cool, Porgy & Bess, Sketches of Spain, A Love Supreme, and My Favorite Things. Hardly a day goes by where I do not listen to at least two of those cds.

Ohhhh, also love Ah Um.

A lot of people don't recognize the gentle side of bears, and this unfailingly throws them into a furious rage.

I love the fact that Mingus named an album Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus.

I also enjoyed reading Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life.

Better get hit in your soul and Goodbye Pork Pie Hat: such great names of songs

64 prescribes the only known cure for the situation noted in 63.

Mingus apparently had quite the temper.

56: pwnd

Also, Scooter Libby wrote a novel involving bear sex. A bear raping a child, in fact. Wholesome family values kind of stuff.

And Libby is not even a Canadian, or even very Canadian-like. (Face it, Canadians: you're really not very Libby-like).

No one ever objects to the bear narrators of Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby and Dr. Faustus. Not sure why. Possibly the authors' unsurpassed subtlety.

People sometimes complain that the respective narrs never think or say, "I am a bear." But what narrators think "I am a human?"

Related: Jonathan Lethem's early sci-fi work was all composed on a bear. When the bear died, he stopped doing genre work.

And that bear was … Ray Davis!

71.2: A terrible moment for BFF. But it's worth noting that book was later adapted into a television show starring a bear dressed as Donald Trump raping the virgin airwaves, which was at least an improvement.

73: people just don't pay enough attention to the subtitle, Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einen Bären, of the last one you mention.

The solecism in the subtitle, like the lack of the apostrophe in Finnegans Wake, is the key to the whole work.

(Counting off the seconds before w-lfs-n points out some error in my declension....)

Oh, look.

As I understand, Andrew Sullivan is a bear and proud, which pretty much takes all the fun out of the whole concept of bear sex.

It takes more than bad breath and a hairy back to be a real bear, poseur!

78: No, that's the subtitle of "Their Eyes Were Watching God". There, "God" is a bear. A bear who will fuck you up if you turn your eyes away.

But where isn't God a bear?

83: You need a tummy, kinda, right?

83: That's okay, Rapebear put the fun back in.

But where isn't God a bear?

This is exactly why C.S. Lewis was a heretic and a fraud.

For an hour I have working up the comment about how Free Jazz lead directly to Iron Butterfly, Dark Star, Esther's Nosejob & Facelift to Fracture & Solar Music Live, and the socio-political meaning of it all, and here you are talking about bears.

Which is a subject, considering my physical appearance, that I do not discuss anywhere that might be read by Andrew Sullivan.

AROOOOOO

Esther's Nosejob and Facelift are both keen, but what I really like is the vocal half of "Moon in June".

Actually it's just the "living can be lovely here in New York State" through "ah but I miss the rain ticky tacky ticky" parts.

"Look around look around look around look around LOOK AROUND LOOK AROUND AGAIN"

Umm, you kinda had to be there

I will listen to again tonight, but I think counting stuff like 86 and scat singing, vocals last at least 13 of 19 minutes until the manipulated violin parts start. And of course, percussion is all the way thru.

I love the whole side. The end reminds me of the last of side 2 of "Anthem of the Sun" among many others. The Mahler Ninth?

Near topically, apparently the Voice fired Nat Hentoff (cost cutting).

Kind of Blue Davis and Bitches Brew Davis are equally awesome. It's the last decade of his output that loses me.

Amen. I tend to automatically assume that any critic who dismisses Davis's early electric work [basically In A Silent Way through to Jack Johnson (and maybe a bit later depending on taste)] is automatically to be dismissed as a moron.

Also, re: the Bad Plus, I saw them three or four years back and hated them. I really wanted to like them, and on paper they sounded like the sort of thing I'd like, but no, they were shit.

Re: Mingus's temper. He apparently once broke Jimmy Knepper's jaw and fucked up his playing forever, and Jimmy Knepper is a candidate for 'most beautiful horn sound ever committed to record'* ['Where Flamingo's Fly' on Gil Evans' Out of the Cool].

* along with Miles Davis' flugelhorn playing, Sonny Rollins in his early period, etc.

For actual Gatsby-meets-bear action, try Stanley Elkins' "The Making of Ashenden." Sadly, all the bear parts, including what I remember as being quite splendid IPA renditions of the bear's vocalizations, seem to be missing from the Google Books preview.

Elkin's.

But what narrators think "I am a human?"

I stop to think this all the time. "I am a human being, goddamnit, I shouldn't be doing this!".

Since Ethan Iverson apparently did read this thread, and there's no way to reach him on his own blog, I thought I'd put a clarifying comment here on the off chance that he sees it: after my initial reactions, I feel I was perhaps a little bit hard on the follow-up essays. I'm still not in full agrement but the "just pissed it away" remark is too strong. Also, ben's link to Do The Math educated me about The Bad Plus' music, some of which I will no doubt be buying soon. So, good work overall, "the Bad Plus guy"!