The early 80s is also when the performance and cheap housing possibilities for free jazz musicians pretty much dried up in lower Manhattan. So, where in 1977 you could go out on any given evening and hear Julius Hemphill, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Davis, and Arthur Blythe in one loft, and Lester Bowie, Cecil Taylor, and Jimmy Lyons in another, Oliver Lake and Michael Gregory Jackson dueting in a third, all for the cost of a couple beers, by 1982 when I actually moved to the city that deal was pretty much done. The strain of music those players represented didn't die out, of course, and became the foundation for the range of things being done by people like John Zorn and Bill Laswell in the 80s. Yet the demise of that musical scene was also the last time relentless, progressive Black jazz musicians had a street presence on the ground, as it were, in NYC bohemia. - Greg Tate, "Black Jazz in the Digital Age"
Does it matter whether progressive Black musicians play jazz now or in the future?
Does it matter whether Black people ever listen to another lick of real jazz from now until the end of time?
Has jazz more than fulfilled its sociocultural, esthetic, and political mandates for Black people given the advances well-educated Blackfolk have made in American society over the past 25 years?
Have jazz's possibilities as a Black art form been exhausted, or does the virtual absence of a coherent community of Black jazz listeners explain the creative stagnation of the art form at present?
As I survey the stage of the Black intellectual conversation going on today, I find that the self-conscious engagement with philosophy I once heard in 70s jazz, politics, religion, and literature has migrated to contemporary African American visual art where one is expected, after Basquiat’s example, to wrestle with race, politics, history, identity, and knotty conceptual questions as a matter of course. Why this is no longer the case in jazz has something to do with the class aspirations and subject position of most younger musicians who are not, at the end of the day, social rebels, but middle class arts professionals whose art has no significance even among a Black middle class—American mass media oriented consumers who prefer soul and hiphop to postbop. - Greg Tate, "Black Jazz in the Digital Age"
While I was in the city I tried to take advantage of the other great aspects to being in New York- by... buying records (in one shop, after picking out Peter Brötzmann's, "Full Blast," among my selections, the gentleman managing the store suggested that I might be interested in the new Sonore album, "It's got Brötzmann with Vandermark and Gustafsson." I didn't have the heart to tell him that I was one of the guys he was referring to and the saxophonist on the poster for "Musician" taped to the wall by my head next to the cash register. Better to nod at the suggestion, take my albums, and walk out before I started to laugh. - Ken Vandermark, Notes From The Field Sep 20, 2007
[John Coltrane's "Dearly Beloved"] is like the current ballad paradigm--no steady pulse, just a miasma of tone and a soloist sort of fighting to stay afloat. - Hank Shteamer, "Promises" Kept // Thunderkiss '65
At one point, the blonde wig guy climbed a mound of dirt next to a construction site, dragging a wooden barrier up with him. He threw it off and broke it, and then he ran down the street yelling: "We're so getting in trouble!" Immediately afterward, he ran right past an idling police car; the two cops inside either didn't see him throwing the barrier or just didn't care. This was Williamsburg, after all; it's tough to imagine a single neighborhood on the planet where an ironic art-kid brass-band parade would cause less of a stir. - Status Ain't Hood, Live: The Black Lips Are Dumb
When the long-playing record (LP) format was introduced by Columbia Records back in the late 1940s, the industry as a whole resisted it, and many predicted it would never take off because 78s sounded better. Without question, early LPs did not sound nearly as good as 78s. But given the choice of listening to all of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on two sides of one record versus sixteen sides of eight records, the consumer opted for convenience and simplicity (not to mention less shelf space).
The industry also resisted the audio cassette. Who in their right mind would prefer a format with an ever-present hiss over the pristine sound of an LP? The answer: nearly everybody. - Fredric Dannen, in What’s the Future of the Music Industry? A Freakonomics Quorum
The majors thrived in an era of artificial scarcity when they were able to control the production and distribution of music. Today, we have an infinite number of choices available to us, and when content is infinitely abundant, the only scarce commodities are convenience, taste, and trust. - Peter Rojas, in What’s the Future of the Music Industry? A Freakonomics Quorum
So, you all know what I’m talking about. You go to the New Music Concert and the textures are appealing, the information is vivid and valid, the performances are excellent. And then there arrives a moment. And in that moment you think to yourself, “Is it possible that this is still happening? What time even is it.” And then you reconnect, and you listen, and you realize, this is still going on. And then you start looking up on the stage to see how many pages are left on the parts. And then the cellist fold out one of the pages to reveal THREE MORE. Say what you will; this is a problem. - Nico Muhly, Too Long
With [Sharon] Jones and [Lee] Fields on board, Daptone's music is sometimes indistinguishable from the funk of 40 years ago. [Gabe] Roth has even passed off new records as old. When Desco started out, the idea of new bands playing old-style funk was a hard sell to the soul aficionados they were trying to reach. So the label's first album, The Revenge of Mr. Mopoji, was credited to "Mike Jackson and the Soul Providers" and purported to be a reissue of a soundtrack from an obscure 1970s kung-fu movie. The movie never existed. "Nobody would even listen to it if they thought it was new," Roth says. "I mean, I wouldn't have either. I can't really blame anybody. Our take on it was, 'Look, the music is real.' " - Indrani Sen, "The 35-Year Plan for Soul Superstardom"
“It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country,” a furious Mr. [Louis] Armstrong told him. President Eisenhower, he charged, was “two faced,” and had “no guts.” For Governor Faubus, he used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print. The two settled on something safer: “uneducated plow boy.” The euphemism, Mr. Lubenow says, was far more his than Mr. Armstrong’s.
Mr. Armstrong bitterly recounted some of his experiences touring in the Jim Crow South. He then sang the opening bar of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” inserting obscenities into the lyrics and prompting Velma Middleton, the vocalist who toured with Mr. Armstrong and who had joined them in the room, to hush him up. - David Margolick, "The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise"
But music written solely for the comfort of its audience is equally irrelevant. Pushing ethnic buttons as a form of quick access to the worshiper’s attention is only advertising. - Bernard Holland, "Does Simple Music Form Simple Faith?"
I feel that there will always be CDs. It's hard to imagine, when I play a concert and we have a CD signing afterwards, the day when there won't be anything to sign. It's hard to imagine something that costs $10, but you can't see or feel it. It's hard to imagine that such a thing will hold its value. - David Finckel (Emerson Quartet cellist, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center co-artistic director), in David Patrick Stearns, "Classical fans must give in to downloads"
On the other hand, if improvisation really is "composition without the benefit of an eraser," then composition is probably improvisation without the benefit of an audience. - Jazz: The Music of Unemployment, A most peculiar paradox
Excellence is what matters, and the reason why doors to concert halls and opera houses should be opened wider is so that the message can be shouted more loudly. More people should be encouraged to make their minds up. Music isn’t there to be lapped up by some supine audience like a doctor’s potion; it is there to be tasted and assessed, and no one who cares about it should avoid the responsibility of making a judgment. - James Naughtie, "Classics For The Masses"
Jazz musicians have been doing ironic covers since the very beginning. - Darcy James Argue, Irony, man
Sometimes Ethan [Iverson] has an idea for something he’s heard recently—and he has no sentimental attachment to it. There’s none of that “Oh man, I danced to that at the prom.” He’s got none of those feelings, so he approaches everything like, “Hmmm, Kurt Cobain liked to use open fifths, just like Stravinsky does.” - Dave King, interviewed by Paul Olson [What I love about this quote is the use of past tense for Cobain and present tense for Stravinsky in the last sentence. Might have been accidental. Go read the whole interview, though, it's fantastic.]
When Jazz is the subject there always seems to be an argument for the value of ignorance. - Wynton Marsalis, in My Favorite Things, Wynton
If seeing Wilco live was cooking a meal, it would be like making a big pot of stew or sauce; starting off with a few ingredients, simmering, sauteing, adding spices, and eventually bringing the whole thing up to a boil, the sum of its parts creating a greater whole.
I'm more accustomed to rock shows that are more akin to cooking lobster: you start off with a pot of boiling water, throw in live creatures that squirm and submit, leading to a decadent feast of meat dipped in butter. A meal that requires a bib. - Soundslope, Wilco, Millennium Park, 9/12/2007
What does it say about the hallowed tradition of Western concert music when it would more readily welcome the chance throwing of dice as a legitimate path to musical decision making than accept the blues-based improvisations of African-American jazz musicians (and post-jazz innovators who were guilty by association, like Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and the AACM)? - The Soul and the System, Why Improvisation?
Mr. West and Mr. Cent may indeed be assholes, but they're symbolic assholes who remind us that American Darwinism has produced a species of Negro Male who can now exploit his fetishized vernacular aura as profitably as multinational corporations can the minerals in your whole damn ancestral homeland. - Greg Tate, "In Praise of Assholes"
I reckon my continuing indifference to [Maria] Schneider's highly refined art is subliminal. She doesn't set off the gag reflex that I have long had to highly orchestrated classical music, but that's what I suspect is lurking, somewhere near the chronic level of an allergen. Clearly, jazz fans who also like euroclassical simply adore her - Tom Hull, Jazz Prospecting (CG #14, Part 13) (I actually think it is the opposite: orchestral thrills, quite possibly for people who have difficulty with classical orchestras)
Further, back in the day, the music never seemed to get started until 10 or 11 p.m. or even later, with the real action getting under way long after midnight. It was great for musicians, who would often show up in the wee, small hours after their gigs at other clubs were finished, but not very welcoming for anyone who had to be in an office at 9 a.m. or filing a story on a morning deadline. - Will Friedwald, "Smalls Redux"
John [Hollenbeck] handles the tension between dissonance and consonance, density and transparency, structure and freedom, darkness and light, repetition and transformation, etc., better than just about anyone else writing small-group jazz right now. I think this is because he really gets that these concepts aren't mere abstractions -- they are all deeply emotionally meaningful, and anyone who wants their music to actually communicate needs to learn how to blend them effectively. - Darcy James Argue, Claudia Quintet, Todd Reynolds @ The Stone
I’ve been downloading masses of old albums that aren’t available for sale in any form. These things were never released on CD, they were deleted in the 70s, and they just don’t exist anymore. But there are these guys who have collections that they’re ripping off vinyl, tidying them up and putting them up on their blogs at 320kbps.’
‘I’d never have got to hear any of this stuff otherwise — and it’s like archiving them, only backwards. It’s making sure they don’t ever disappear by releasing them into the wild, rather than locking them up in a vault. - anonymous musician, in New Music Strategies, Three Conversations About Music
If you’re a no-talent wannabe, who needs publicity to get noticed as you sell singles and never generate any touring income, the major label is FOR YOU! - Lefsetz Letter, More Rubin/Columbia
I genuinely believe that this current generation of clean living, still performing, stage hogging, liver spotted and roast-chicken-skinned baby-boomer rock performers will not only live on for decades - thanks to advances in computers and robotics they will live forever.
Welcome to a nightmare world where Elvis Costello never ever stops releasing albums. Where Sting is constantly 're-sleeved' into newer, blonder, smugger bodies, like in that sci-fi book Altered Carbon. Where Phil Collins shags your great great granddaughter. Where the babyboomers live on into eternity, sucking all the oxygen out of the pop sphere. - Steven Wells, Sting, where is thy death?
The finest singers not only hit the notes but erase the difference between notes and words. Singing is most thrilling when it becomes a kind of heightened talking. That’s what happens in Pavarotti's “Che gelida manina” or “E lucevan le stelle” or "Una furtiva lagrima": the beauty of the sound envelops you, but you’re not conscious of the artifice of art. It’s as if someone were making conversation in a dialect of dreams. - The Rest Is Noise, Thougts on Pavarotti
Bellowing ridiculous lyrics without so much as batting an eyelid is a cornerstone of rock n roll and I for one will forever defend the right of bands to pen songs about Tolkien, The Crimean War, Genghis Khan, Stonehenge to the hilt:) - bertjansch, commenting on The Led Zeppelin reformation rocks
Through Musician, the audience gets to share the joy of booking gigs. You will see Vandermark pay one sideman a dollar extra for driving. You will start to understand how much fun load-in can be. - J.B. Spins, Work: Musician
Ce qui est drôle, c'est qu'en France le jazz a deux images : celle d'une musique d'intellos torturés et incompréhensibles, ou celle des bons fêtards entre le pastis et le cassoulet.
Mais aux Etats-Unis, c'est une autre affaire. Le jazz, c'est le SEXE. Faites attention la prochaine fois que vous voyez un film hollywoodien où le héros va passer une soirée "intime" avec sa bien-aimée. S'il met un disque, ce sera du jazz. Bonne nouvelle ! Née dans les bordels de la Nouvelle Orléans, cette musique centenaire semble donc garder dans l'inconscient collectif américain toute sa puissance érotique... à condition bien sûr de la rendre présentable à la copine de Spiderman ! - Laurent de Wilde, Jazz et Super-Héros (on the jazz club scene in Spiderman 3)
La seconde partie du concert de ce mercredi soir 5 septembre à Jazz à La Villette a confirmé que pour faire du neuf, 5+4 est une formule imparable. - Alex Dutilh, Imani Wayne
Much of what we’ve accepted as jazz repertory over the past eight decades has been forgettable popular songs and dull variations on popular songs, raised to the level of art by intensely creative performances which do not merely interpret but vastly improve upon the original material. And there are a lot of corny, boring, or banal songs and jazz originals out there which resist such treatment because they are simply too corny, boring, or banal. - Art Lange, "A Fickle Sonance" Point of Departure September 2007 (an excellent and stimulating article overall)
At a time when globalization, stylistic hybridization and post-modernism’s dismissal of dialectical progress has all but atomized the traditional jazz family tree model – with the roots of blues, spirituals and work songs supporting the trunk, limbs and branches – the Italian jazz grapevine model has matured. Though it honors graying trailblazers like trumpeter Enrico Rava and pianist Franco D’Andrea (who performed as a duo mid-way in the Siena Jazz festival that coincides with the seminars), the grapevine model is horizontal, spidering outward in various directions, with shoots entwining about each other. This model has engendered a refreshingly dogma-free pluralism in Italian jazz, which is at the root of the growing international recognition of its vitality. (...) Both Schiaffini and Battaglia point to the need to let students learn. “If you tell them everything,” Schiaffini suggested, “then there is nothing for them to discover.” Battaglia believes that “you have to leave space for them to fill in,” whether the student is performing or composing... “This is jazz we’re trying to teach,” said Schiaffini with a faint incredulity. “You can’t give them all of the answers. If they all have the same answers, they will be clones,” Schiaffini added, tapping the table with his fist, as if he was cutting cookies. - Bill Shoemaker, "Page One," Point of Departure September 2007
Anyone Fancy A Chocolate Digestive was predictably Mahler-esque in its intensity, but the best song was about tortoises. There aren't nearly enough songs about tortoises; I bet even bloody Tortoise have never written a song about a tortoise. This is, frankly, pathetic. - Do You Come Here Often?, Dish Launch
When great trees fall, it is wise, I think, for us to praise the ground they grew out of. - Maya Angelou, from her eulogy for Max Roach
An image is still fresh in my mind of the shaven-headed black man in a dashiki whose technique I glommed, or tried to: he bent at the waist, snapped his fingers and shook his bright dome as if in a self-amused trance. His obliviousness to our regard was what I wanted for myself, was what I wished to hijack on behalf of my own craven pursuit of regard. I began immediately shaking my head, not yet capable of observing the finer details, how his head-shaking must surely have been driven by less ostentatious but completely authoritative movements through his feet and hips, zones I'd yet to learn to activate. But my ears were open, I wasn't deaf to the music, I know I was in the kind of bodily rapture-in-sound where all real dancing begins. Alas, I was trying to lead my dance with my head, like trying to play a song's bass line on a pair of cymbals, or a triangle. Somehow I made this my trademark - no one intervened to advise me otherwise - and so I built my dancing body from the head-shake downward, like a Cheshire cat begun at the grin. - Jonathan Lethem, "We happy fakes"
[Rick] Rubin then invented a label, calling his company Def Jam ("Def" meaning great, and "Jam" meaning music) - Lynn Hirschberg "The Music Man"
Christian Brun In Brooklyn vs. Don Cherry Complete Communion: inspiration, quote or theft? (and no, the former is not on Blue Note)
On [Money Jungle], as on so many other great jazz recordings, the possibility of failure is tangible, and the participants don't seem interested in concealing it: the result is not artful, it is art. - Jazz: The Music of Unemployment, A Little Max
Ms. [Geri] Allen [is] a member of the first jazz generation to encounter the avant-garde as something other than an insurrection. At 50, she is roughly two decades younger than Mr. [Reggie] Workman and Mr. [Andrew] Cyrille, and roughly a dozen years younger than Mr. [Oliver] Lake: the right age to have absorbed free improvisation as a thread in the canvas of jazz tradition. - Nate Chinen reviews Trio 3 + Geri Allen
But particularly cozy to my cardiac is Toronto sax-and-buckets, ecstatic-jazz duo Feuermusik... I suspect that for many judges it was their first time hearing F'musik... a real testament to how captivating their Coltrane-on-a-skateboard sound is. - Zoilus, Look at this Showroom, Full of Fabulous Prizes (Vote Feuermusik!)
I can’t escape the academic calendar; every time I try to recenter myself to a January-is-the-beginning it backfires. - Nico Muhly, Fuel
And few grown-up fans — except for parents — were paying attention in 2002, when she released her first CD, a concept album loosely inspired by Saint Nicholas, the fourth-century bishop of Myra. (It was called “Santa Claus Lane.”) (...) There were a couple of duds, including “Gypsy Woman,” a funk-pop misfire that probably wouldn’t exist if the Romany community had a stronger political lobby. - Kelefah Sanneh reviewing a Hillary Duff concert, in "Amid All the Cheers, a Few Signs of Change"
So help me figure out what to call the-style-formerly-known-as-minimalism. I'm tempted to suggest something arbitrary like Cogluotobusisletmesism, or Btfsplkism, some ungainly, difficult-to-parse term that the critics can't pronounce nor the public remember, so they won't appropriate it again and make it mean something else. - Kyle Gann, Bowing to the Great God Usage
It seems to me that when you are getting your [symphony orchestra] asses handed to you by a bunch of Venezuelan street kids, it's time for everyone involved to take a long hard look in the mirror. - Darcy James Argue, Brave New World
