Missing comments

My comment provider is temporarily (I hope) out of commission. Along with my recent bout of computeritis, I hadn't seen the comments posted recently until today. Here are a couple of comments I want to respond to.

David says:
I love to read music reviews, but I do wish that jazz critics understood music better, had better ears (as do many classical critics).

Are you saying that classical critics have better ears than their jazz counterparts? If Greg Sandow and Kyle Gann are any indication, classical critics tend to be conservatory-educated composers/musicians, whereas I doubt that this is often the case for jazz critics (apart from a few like André Hodeir or Leonard Feather).

Benny Green (for example) was an English critic and amateur-level saxophonist who wrote well (cf. his anthology Such Sweet Thunder and numerous album liner notes) and could be entertaining, but was often amazingly condescending (paradoxically, even when displaying withering modesty), rather in-your-face with his technical knowledge. I remember one passage in which he excoriates jazz fans for not making more effort to understand the nuts and bolts of the music. I felt like smacking him, which I couldn't do, because Green is dead.

For example, a real basic question to me in discussing a jazz musician is whether or not he can play changes. There are jazz musican who can't whom I love despite this (Blythe, Garbarek, and Golia are favorites, for example, who have other strengths that compensate for this basic deficiency), but, in any case, I don't recall reading any critic mention this about any musician.

It seems to me that this was a big issue when free jazz came around (starting with Ornette Coleman), in terms of distinguishing the fakers from the real players. Even before that, a Hughes Panassié would dismiss Miles and Roach as not playing jazz.

Recently, I was listening to Archie Shepp's I Know About the Life and his renditions of "Well, You Needn't," "'Round Midnight" and "Giant Steps" are painful because these tunes demand a certain amount of precision and rigour and Shepp simply skates around these demands. Feeling that I might be missing the point, I discussed this with a friend far more versed in free jazz than I and he agreed with my assessment, for the same reasons. So I was astounded to read a few positive reviews of this album: it's pretty terrible, to the point where I really wondered why Hat Hut went out of its way to re-issue this.

However, I don't know if "playing changes" is the ultimate test. I'm sure a Sonny Stitt could eat up any changes you gave him, but wasn't he less sure-footed when playing modally? As jazz contexts broaden and fragment, I'm not sure "playing changes" can be held up as a central thing. A very important element, sure, but if you're not playing in a changes-oriented context... how much does it matter?

The way I think about music has been influenced by critics, but ultimately I don't trust their taste, certainly not as much as musicians.

That's certainly a good rule of thumb, but I don't know that musicians necessarily have better taste than fans or critics. Even if they can explain the "how" or "why" better, whether or not one likes or understands something goes beyond that, I feel.

No comments on the following paragraph, but I thought it interesting:
Here are some thoughts about the progress of jazz: I think that until 30-40 years ago the progress of improvised melody, harmony and rythm was more-or-less linear, essentially from simple to complex. Other developments such as the rise and fall of big bands, the development of Afro-Cuban jazz, modal song forms, etc. have been tangential to the progress of the technique of jazz improvisation. I see the history of jazz as a miniature of the history of the history of classical music (progress accelerates; I recognized this observation of mine when I read Future Shock a few years ago), and I see jazz since 1970 as similar to the state of classical music since around the turn of the 20th century (i.e. the birth of modernism, which saw composers - I think Debussy was the first - taking the next logical step from the extrem chromaticism of late Romantic music by dispensing with the cadence as the fundamental organizing principal of music, and either replacing it with contrived, less intuitive systems [notably the yin and yang of serialism and repetition, or ending with music that was sort of amorphous) -that is to say, a multiplicity of -isms. Another book that influenced my thinking about this stuff was Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society, which I read for a paper I wrote in high school. I'm not going to get into his philosophy, except to note that I think he was wrong about most aspects of society, but pretty perceptive about the arts and music (not withstanding the fact that he was tone deaf), although, being a secular humanist type, rather than a Christian mystic like him, I'd replace his word, "spirituality," with "intuition," which I think is the stuff of all great art (speaking of Schuller, he I think he grasped the essence of intuition in a comment from the liner notes of a Sonny Rollins record I own - something like "he has the ability to play a complete surprise that seems inevitable in retrospect" - I love that phrase).

Armando commented on Dave Holland's Extended Play:
I love this record. It's exciting, exquisitely performed, and a substantial sampling of one of the best, if not THE best, bands in jazz today.

Even more exciting is that I recall Robin Eubanks saying (perhaps at the Jazz Corner boards) that they sound even better than that these days.

That wouldn't be surprising, considering the album was recorded over two years ago. Although, with the change in drummer, the group may have lost something... He also said that the second Big Band recording would be much better than the first, I hope that turns out to be the case.