giovanni's return

A new Secrety Society concert has been posted, with a revamped "Perils Of Empire." The ominous-movie-score first section has been reinforced, but the second section has lost much of the drunk-Sicilian-stumbling-back-home feel that I loved in earlier versions. There are probably lots more tweaks to discover, but this one was the easiest. Maybe it's always been like that, but the way "Lizard Brain" (a feature for baritonist Josh Sinton) end reminds me of something from Paul Dunmall's Moksha Big Band.

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To answer Jack Reilly's question (even if it's rhetorical): yes, absolutely! He's back (and it's been way too long) with a GIOVANNI PETRANICH missive to Down Beat that takes Brad Mehldau and Pat Metheny to task over their percieved disdain for (...one guess...) Bill Evans. Of course, it wouldn't be Jack Reilly Giovanni Petranich if Metheny wasn't consistently misspelled Matheny. If anyone has February's Down Beat, is the letter actually published in it (or does that issue contain the Metheny/Mehldau article)?

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Yvinek has a lovely Michael Brecker rememberance, which includes both real and dreamt interaction with him.

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Bobby Broom posts an article, which contains this Sidney Bechet quote: "It was like they were trying to find out in this music what they were supposed to do with this freedom..." He's referring to the dawn of jazz, but the sentiment resonates today.

Broom then returns us to the old "jazz fundamentals" debate:

The move to look away from the elements of jazz that have remained constant through the ages... is a blatant dismissal of the jazz spirit. That is to say, by ignoring these necessary elements we undermine jazz and relegate it to a slow death. If I come across as radical, then try the following experiment: Remove these two characteristics—a sense of swing and blues feeling—from the list of musical attributes of your favorite jazz musicians, then assess what remains. Would they still hold up as major players and contributors in jazz?

I would argue that a significant amount might remain, depending on the player and as suggested by, say, the SME's Karyobin (to take a random example that's close to hand, but adds and subtracts a lot more than just blues and swing), which is not to denigrate swing as a key jazz invention and blues as a key contributor.

erg links to a Bobby Broom video which is full of blues (I love Kobie Watkins's drumming on this one).