It Is Not Mean If It Is True (Attack Attack Attack)

Tropester!

2012-01-29T17:37:00.000-08:00

Chris Rich. Can you possibly dig it?

A friend of the music, a new media hero. Author of the late-ish, great Brilliantcornersabostonjazz blog, now author of the Random Access Memory resource intensive Sound Unities.

Chris can write with the verve and depth of understanding that Mencken brought to the craft. He also has a very well tuned bullshit detector. That alone is definitely worth a horn octet.

Mind you, there's more of this kind of thing over at the Soundcloud page if you don't want to wait for these to dribble out one at a time. In the mean time Chris, this one, here and now, is for you!

Song of EQ and Groove study for Andre

2012-01-20T10:46:00.000-08:00

Song of EQ and Groove study for Andre by Stanley Jason Zappa

No story of meeting guys on Craigslist and buying second hand recording technology from the 90's is complete without mention of one Andre Cholmondele, as it was he who said "just get a VS880...you can find them cheap."

The next thing you know, I'm waiting in an insurance office for a young, deeply religious Russian lad to get the unit from his cubicle. "We now have a 96 track fully automated recording environment at our church, so I don't use this all that much."

Perfect!

While you probably all know Andre from his relationship to the music of a certain trademarked moustache, you should also know him for his other musical forays.

On this humble track, there is a "beat" and there is an effort to use the EQ controls to some sort of effect or another. Because I can only hear these songs through small plastic computer speakers and/or walkman headphones from before the Clinton era, I'm not sure if my EQ efforts were successful. On the Tascam 2488, there is an element of visual EQ curve shaping, which is a bit beyond my grasp at present...it reminds me of math classes I didn't take.

Andre, this track is for you. Listeners, stay tuned for more of the Many Instalments of Me!

Song of Alto Study for Jim Hobbs

2012-01-15T17:56:00.000-08:00

Song of Alto Study for Jim Hobbs by Stanley Jason Zappa

Hells Jeah Jim Hobbs!

I very much quite enjoyed Tragedies of Love, which featured Hobbs in the company of the ultra fantastic Laurence "National Treasure" Cook.

I also quite enjoyed Apparent Distances with the Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet. That was quite a thing. Hobbs' socks are pulled up, belt buckled, hair combed and believe you me gets the job done.

The alto saxophone on this recording is also a craigslist score. The horn is pretty great, but the mouthpiece is a dog. China does a perfectly fine job making horns, but still bunt with the mouthpieces.

This recording is from the first digital recording device purchased on craigslist--the VS880. It's hard to get the zeros and ones out of the VS-880. This is actually a recording of the analog out from the VS-880, which was then re-mastered on the Tascam 2488 (the new craigslist acquisition.)

I know these things have been around for a while, and the whole computer music studio-in-a-lap-top is nothing new, but it's pretty new to me, and kind of a lot to come to grips with--namely the fact that this is nothing new, and what was my excuse (other than price point) for waiting this long to get in on it?

It is also not entirely easy to come to grips with the fact that at a point in my life time, this Tascam 2488, which is essentially a plastic toy, represents unfathomable technical sophistication and power. Mind you, it's no replacement for a Studer tape deck and some super trick analog board, but it was for a lot of people who took the digital plunge...thinking of a certain trademarked moustache... Now, in 2012, a 24 track digital recording set up can be purchased literally out of the back of a pick up truck in the parking lot of a dry cleaner for less than the price of a roll of 2" tape.

8 tracks of alto saxophone...the newest horn, and many ways the hardest horn, ergo the admiration for Jim Hobbs, Marco Eneidi, Jimmy Lyons, Dudu Pukwana, Giuseppi Logan, Jack Wright, Rob Brown, etcetera and so forth.

More of the same sort of thing to follow!

More Many Installments Of Me!

2012-01-10T17:36:00.000-08:00

Feeling glum because of the wrist injury, the toilet backing up all by it self with any help from anyone else, the car keys getting locked in the car and the dog pissing the bed (but not necessarily in that order?)

Well, I don't know what to tell you, but maybe more episodes of the hit series The Many Instalments of Me here on the NMIT channel will put some pep back in your step.

Now that I have a Tascam 2488 (thank you mom! Thank you Craigslist!) a new era of narcissism has blossomed. Enclosed are the three latest examples.

I am trying to put something on all 24 tracks, which is why the songs are so short.

Now I know you're worried that we'll forget all about Theodore Adorno. Don't worry, we'll get back to Theodore Adorno. There's also a new Harold Bloom book in the collection...perhaps we'll do the ol' replace one word for another game. Remember those care free, innocent days?

Anyhow, three tracks, all made in the last week. Go over and press some buttons on my Soundcloud why don't you. Also, if you know anything about toilets, wrist injuries, geriatric canine incontinence or breaking into Ford Rangers, the comment section is open.

Song for Mom by Stanley Jason Zappa

Song for Daniel by Stanley Jason Zappa

Song for Lady Lady by Stanley Jason Zappa

Goodbye Sam Rivers

2011-12-27T20:02:00.000-08:00

Very sad. Very very sad.

A wonderful horn player. A favorite among the legion of greats who played with Miles Davis.

And so it goes...

Whereupon Teddy Drops A Chocolate Yule Log on the Ambivalence of Retarded Listeners, Jazz Administrators and Pattern Based So-Called Improvisation

2011-12-24T14:47:00.000-08:00

The ambivalence of the retarded listeners has its most extreme expression in the fact that individuals, not yet fully reified, want to extricate themselves from the mechanism of musical reification to which they have been handed over, but that their revolts against fetishism only entangle them more deeply in it. Whenever they atempt to break away from the passive status of compulsory consumers and "activate" themselves, they succumb to pseudoactivity. Types rise up from the mass of the retarded who differentiate themselves by pseudoactivity and nevertheless make the regression more strikingly visible. There are, first, the enthusiasts who write fan letters to radio stations and orchestras and, at well-managed jazz festivals, produce their own enthusiasm as an advertisement for the wares they consume. They call themselves jitterbugs, as if they simultaneously wanted to affirm and mock their loss of individuality, their transformation into beetles whirring around in fascination. Their only excuse is that the term jitterbugs, like all those in the unreal edifice of films and jazz, is hammered into them by the entrepreneurs to make them think that they are on the inside. Their ecstasy is without content. That it happens, that the music is listened to, this replaces the content itself. The ecstasy takes possession of its object by its own compulsive character. It is stylized like the ecstasies savages go into in beating the war drums. It has convulsive aspects reminiscent of St. Vitus' dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals. Passion itself seems to be produced by defects. But the ecstatic ritual betrays itself as pseudoactivity by the moment of mimicry. People do not dance or listen "from sensuality" and sensuality is certainly not satisfied by listening, but the gestures of the sensual are imitated. An analogue is the representation of particular emotions in the film, where there are physiognomic patterns for anxiety, longing, the erotic look; for smiling; for the atomistic expressivo of debased music. The imitative assimilation to commodity models is intertwined with folkloristic customs of imitation. In jazz, the relation of such mimicry to the imitating individual himself is quite loose. Its medium is caricature. Dance and music copy stages of sexual excitement only to make fun of them. It is as if desire's surrogate itself simultaneously turned against it; the "realistic" behavior of the oppressed triumphs over his dream of happiness while being itself incorporated into the latter. And as if to confirm the superficiality and treachery of every form of ecstasy, the feet are unable to fulfill what the ear pretends. The same jitterbugs who behave as if they were electrified by syncopation dance almost exclusively the good rhythmic parts. The weak flesh punishes the lies of the willing spirit; the gestural ecstasy of the infantile listener misfires in the face of the ecstatic gesture. The opposite type appears to be the eager person who leaves the factory and "occupies" himself with music in the quiet of his bedroom. He is shy and inhibited, perhaps has no luck with girls, and wants in any case to preserve his own special sphere...He brings nothing home which would not be delivered to his house. The adventures of pseudo activity have already organised themselves on a large scale...all this is carefully fostered from above...It is irrelevant to him what he hears or even how he hears; he is only interested in the fact that he hears and succeeds in inserting himself...into the public mechanism without exerting even the slightest influence on it...Others are more expert, or at least more aggressive. These smart chaps can be found everywhere and are able to do everything themselves: the advanced student who in every gathering is ready to play jazz with machinelike precision for dancing and entertainment; the gas station attendant who hums his syncopation ingenuously while filling up the tank;the listening expert who can identify every band and immerses himself in the history of jazz as if it were Holy Writ. He is nearest to the sportsman; if not to the football player himself, then to the swaggering fellow who dominates the stands. He shines by a capacity for rough improvisations, even if he must practice the piano for hours in secret in order to bring the refractory rhythms together. He pictures himself as the individualist who whistles at the world. But what he whistles is its melody, and his tricks are less inventions of the moment than stored-up experiences from acquaintance with sought-after technical things. His improvisations are always gestures of nimble subordination to what the instrument demands of him. The chauffer is the model for the listening type of the clever fellow. His agreement with everything dominant goes so far that he no longer produces any resistence, but of his own accord always does what is asked of him for the sake of the responsible functionary. He lies to himself about the completeness of his subordination to the rule of the reified mechanism. Thus, the sovereign routine of the jazz amateur is nothing but the passive capacity for adaptation to models from which to avoid straying. He is the real jazz subject: his improvisations come from the pattern, and he navigates the pattern, cigarette in mouth, as nonchalantly as if he had invented it himself.

Adorno, Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening

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Whenever Adorno starts hating on "jazz" I think of "jazz" as including all the things Bill Dixon hated in "jazz". When I think of all the things Adorno hates about "jazz" and I subtract those things from "music" I feel like that's Dixon's music, Son of Sisyphus forward.

Adorno hated plenty of other things in music, and chances are I've collected those hatreds somewhere on this blog. My sense (and there's no way to check if I'm right) is that Adorno's imagined, idealized music and Dixon's actual, realized music are pretty close to one another.

Though he loved it so, and saw it as the foundation of his work, Dixon took every opportunity to let it be know his music was not "jazz."

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Am I the only one who loves how Adorno breaks down archetypes? Kind of like Jung, but a little different. Who hasn't met:

the eager person who leaves the factory and "occupies" himself with music in the quiet of his bedroom. He is shy and inhibited, perhaps has no luck with girls, and wants in any case to preserve his own special sphere...the advanced student who in every gathering is ready to play jazz with machinelike precision for dancing and entertainment; the gas station attendant who hums his syncopation ingenuously while filling up the tank;the listening expert who can identify every band and immerses himself in the history of jazz as if it were Holy Writ.

It's not mean if it's true, right?

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Further on,

The chauffer is the model for the listening type of the clever fellow. His agreement with everything dominant goes so far that he no longer produces any resistence, but of his own accord always does what is asked of him for the sake of the responsible functionary.

I don't have a problem with chauffeur per se...my problem is more with the people who hire them. But better the chauffeur archetype drive cars than drive culture, or curate festivals, or run recording companies, or head PR firms--no, the chauffeurs of the world should drive Town Cars to and from the airport. We need responsible functionaries when it comes to arriving at the airport two hours in advance of departure to allow adequate time for TSA hazing.

We do not need responsible functionaries when it comes to Art. Responsible functionality is boring and inevitably rewards the boring (and obsequious) for generating more boredom. Like attracts like. We do not need responsible functionaries choosing "who's next" or opining on "what's now." We do not need responsible functionaries curating "well rounded" festivals that have "something for everyone."

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And then Adorno whips this on us

the sovereign routine of the jazz amateur is nothing but the passive capacity for adaptation to models from which to avoid straying. He is the real jazz subject: his improvisations come from the pattern, and he navigates the pattern, cigarette in mouth, as nonchalantly as if he had invented it himself.

Can you possibly dig it? I'm looking at you Mr. Berk. Not that I'm hating on said institution, but it really is an epicentre for improvisations that come from the pattern. If Berklee is the fourth temple, Jerry Bergonzi's Inside Improvisation are the apocrypha of the apocrypha. I'm not hating on the Inside Improvisation series either--quite the opposite. Volumes 1, 2 and 3 live on my music stand. I don't have volume 4, volume 5 lives on a very high shelf in a different room. Maybe one day Santa will bring vol. 6 and 7. I'd love to check them out. They sure do scoot you all over the horn, which is a good thing. The CD's that come with are a series of blog posts in and of themselves.

What about improvisation with no patterns? Is that even possible? If it were, do you think it would be the sound of use value, exchange value, neither, or both?

Is the pursuit of improvisation with no patterns a waste of a life?

Dixon had his patterns. The one that comes to mind is the 3 notes a fifth away lick, (i.e. C - G - D) transposed all over the instrument. Jimmy Lyons had his things, Cecil Taylor has his things...but they are their things.

That's the thing.

The heater guy came by the house, which I am given to understand is the first step to having a heater in one's house. As he looked at our plumbing in a state of frightened confusion and disgust, we got to talking about the [blank] who designed and partially installed it.

Our heater guy knew the [blank], as undoing and repairing his mistakes is a fair amount of his income. He also made this point:

He's good at unclogging toilets. I don't do that. Let him do that. We need toilet uncloggers.

Unclogging the toilet is very important and the task of doing so is hardly a punishment. It is also, undeniably, a task better suited to some than others. I have to believe once class stigma and wage differentiation are removed from all tasks there will be a more natural pairing of tasks and people predisposed to execute them. What would the world be like if everyone had a job they were good at and enjoyed?

Let the toilet uncloggers unclog toilets--because they sure can't design or install plumbing/heating systems worth a fuck. Let the responsible functionaries chauffeur artists to and from the "jazz" festival which they, the artists, curate themselves.

Let the pattern based improviser be recognized and understood as, at their very best and in the most generous of lights, equal to those improvisers for whom pattern constitutes "error."

Sensory Pleasure Turns into Disgust / Displacement of Feelings into Exchange Value / Neurotic Mechanisms of Stupidity in Listening / The Arrogantly Ignorant Rejection of Everything Unfamiliar

2011-12-20T16:23:00.000-08:00

...A sensory pleasure turns into disgust as soon as it is seen how it only still serves to betray the consumer. The betrayal here consists in always offering the same thing. Even the most insensitive hit song enthusiast cannot always escape the feeling that the child with the sweet tooth comes to know in the candy store. If the charms wear off and turn into their opposite--the short life of most hit songs belongs in the same range of experience--then the cultural ideology which clothes the upper-level music business finishes things off by causing the lower to be heard with a bad conscience. Nobody believes so completely in prescribed pleasure. But the listening nevertheless remains regressive in assenting to this situation despite all distrust and all ambivalence. As a result of the displacement of feelings into exchange-value, no demands are really advanced in music anymore. Substitutes satisfy their purpose as well, because the demand to which they adjust themselves has itself already been substituted. But ears which are still only able to hear what one demands of them in what is offered, and which register the abstract charm instead of synthesizing the moments of charm, are bad ears. Even in the "isolated' phenomenon, key aspects will escape them; that is, those which transcend its own isolation. There is actually a neurotic mechanism of stupidity in listening, too; the arrogantly ignorant rejection of everything unfamiliar is its sure sign. Regressive listeners behave like children. Again and again, and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served.

A sort of musical children's language is prepared for them; it differs from the real thing in that its vocabulary consists exclusively of fragments and distortions of the artistic language of music...The regulated musical traffic is worthy of them. It cannot be compared with that in the streets. It swarms with mistakes in phrasing and harmony...One would like to blame them on the amateurs with whom most of the hit songs originate, while the real musical work is first done by the arrangers. But just as a publisher does not let a misspelled word go out into the world, so it is inconceivable that, well-advised by their experts, they publish amateur versions without checking them. The mistakes are either consciously produced by the experts or intentionally permitted to stand--for the sake of the listeners. One could attribute to the publishers and experts the wish to ingratiate themselves with the listeners, composing as nonchalantly and informally as a dilettante drums out a hit songs after haring it. Such intrigues would be of the same stripe, even if considered psychologically different, as the incorrect spelling in many advertising slogans. But even if one wanted to exclude their acceptance as too farfetched, the typographical errors could be understood. On the one hand, the infantile hearing demands sensually rich and full sonority, sometimes represented by the luxuriant thirds, and it is precisely this demand in which the infantile musical language is in most brutal contradiction with the children's song. On the other hand, the infantile hearing always demands the most comfortable and fluent resolutions. The consequences of the "rich" sonority, with correct treatment of voices, would be so far from the standardized harmonic relations that the listener would have to reject them as "unnatural."

Adorno, ibid

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Isn't life the process of sensual pleasures turning into disgust?

Isn't life the process of discovering how our sensual pleasures ultimately exist to betray us as consumers?

Isn't life the continual displacement of feelings into exchange-value?

Do only children demand the one dish that has been served to them?

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Speaking of children and their music, here's a story I'm going to tell poorly:

Back at certain all girl's drama factory in Southern Vermont, Bill Dixon once told the story of having to go to the local elementary school to talk with the teachers about his son who, at the time, maybe wasn't doing so good in music class.

So Bill went to the school and got a load of what constituted "music" at the elementary school level. Doing so thus concluded any worry Bill may have had that his son was the problem.

misquote: "He's been listening to my music all his life...how the fuck is he supposed to go into a classroom and do that nick-nack-paddy-wack-give-a-dog-a-bone stupid shit?"

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The regulated musical traffic is worthy of them. It cannot be compared with that in the streets. It swarms with mistakes in phrasing and harmony

"in the streets"--now isn't that an interesting phrase? Makes me think that there are two separate, distinct musical realms: "street music" and "professional, arranged music" with our beloved improvisation as "street" and "regulated" commodity music as the other.

And really, can any discussion of directing traffic be complete without at least nodding to the crazy phenomena where the getting rid of traffic signs and lights make safer [i.e. more functional] roads?

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infantile hearing always demands the most comfortable and fluent resolutions

And on that note, along with the previous about safe roads, a little something we can all agree with.

Capitulate Before the Superior Power / Purchase Spiritual Peace

2011-12-11T13:27:00.000-08:00

Together with sport and film, mass music and the new listening help to make escape from the whole infantile milieu impossible. The sickness has a preservative function. Even the listening habits of the contemporary masses are certainly in no way new, and one may readily concede that the reception of the prewar hit song "Puppchen" was not so very different from that of a synthetic jazz children's song. But the context in which such a children's song appears, the masochistic mocking of one's own wish for lost happiness, or the compromising of the desire for happiness itself by the reversion to a childhood whose unattainably bears witness to the unattainably of joy--this is the specific product of the new listening, and nothing which strikes the ear remains exempt from this system of assimilation. There are indeed social differences, but the new listening extends so far that the stultification of the oppressed affects the oppressors themselves, and they become victims of the superior power of self-propelled wheels who think they are determining their direction.

Regressive listening is tied to production by the machinery of distribution, and particularly by advertising. Regressive listening appears as soon as advertising turns into terror, as soon as nothing is left for the consciousness but to capitulate before the superior power of the advertised stuff and purchase spiritual peace by making the imposed goods literally its own thing. In regressive listening, advertising takes on a compulsory character. For a while, an English brewery used for propaganda purposes a billboard that bore a deceptive likeness to one of those whitewashed brick walls which are so numerous in the slums of London and the industrial cities of the North. Properly placed, the billboard was barely distinguishable from a real wall. On it, chalk-white, was a careful imitation of awkward writing. The words said : "What we want is Watney's." The brand of the beer was presented like a political slogan. Not only does this billboard give an insight into the nature of up-to-date propaganda, which sells its slogans as well as its wares, just as here the wares masquerade as a slogan; the type of relationship suggested by the billboard, in which masses make a commodity recommended to them the object of their own action, is in fact found again as the pattern for the reception of light music. They need and demand what has been palmed off on them. They overcome the feeling of impotence that creeps over them in the face of monopolistic production by identifying themselves with the inescapable product.

More Adorno, Theodore ibid

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Why did it take so long for me to figure out the highlight function?

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Nothing says Christmas like

capitulate before the superior power of the advertised stuff and purchase spiritual peace by making the imposed goods literally its own thing.

That's a pretty great slogan right there.

Speaking of slogans

Not only does this billboard give an insight into the nature of up-to-date propaganda, which sells its slogans as well as its wares, just as here the wares masquerade as a slogan.

Just do it! And man oh man when I'm wearing my swoosh swish what the fuck I AM REALLY DOING IT!

When and where are we going to see the first "Free Jazz" billboard? Vandermark 5 billboards on Interstate 290? William Parker billboards on the Mosholu Parkway? Nate Wooley billboards on US 395?

Certainly there must be some art money out there to put up billboards in Northern Saskatchewan promoting Charles Gayle, complete with catchy slogan, something like: Charles Gayle--The Best Answer To Everything Imaginable.

Ted goes on to say (as you probably read)

the type of relationship suggested by the billboard, in which masses make a commodity recommended to them the object of their own action, is in fact found again as the pattern for the reception of light music. They need and demand what has been palmed off on them.

and then later

They overcome the feeling of impotence that creeps over them in the face of monopolistic production by identifying themselves with the inescapable product.

My questions:

Can "we" with relationship suggestions on billboards induce the masses to make a commodity "we" recommend to them (Charles Gayle) the object of their own action? Can "we," through the afore mentioned methods make the masses "need and demand what ("we" have) palmed off on them, namely Charles Gayle?
Could "Free Jazz" or "C.E.F." (crazy experimental freedom) create a feeling of impotence that creeps over (the masses) in the face of monopolistic production?
Could "Free Jazz" or "C.E.F." ever become the object of monopolistic production?
If "Free Jazz" or "C.E.F." became the inescapable product with which the masses identify in order to overcome the feeling of impotence that creeps over them in the face of monopolistic production, would "Free Jazz" or "C.E.F." still sound like "Free Jazz" or "C.E.F"--or would it sound like the inescapable products of now, which give us (me anyway) this very feeling of impotence Adorno describes?

Forcible Retardation, Pinched Hatred, Neurotic Stupidity and the Genius of Children.

2011-11-10T21:00:00.000-08:00

In music as elsewhere, the discrepancy between essence and appearance has grown to a point where no appearance is any longer valid, without mediation, as verification of the essence. The unconscious reactions of the listeners are so heavily veiled and their conscious assessment is so exclusively oriented to the dominant fetish categories that every answer one receives conforms in advance to the surface of that music business which is attached by the theory being "verified." As soon as one presents the listener with the primitive question about liking or disliking, there comes into play the whole machinery which one had thought could be made transparent and eliminated by the reduction to this question. But if one tries to replace the most elementary investigative procedures with others which take account of the real dependence of the listener on the mechanism, this complication of the investigative procedure not merely makes the interpretation of the result more difficult, but it touches off the resistance of the respondents and drives them all the deeper into the conformist behavior in which they think they can remain concealed from the danger of exposure...It suffices to remember how many sorrows he is spared who no longer thinks too many thoughts, how much more "in accordance with reality" a person behaves when he affirms that the real is right, how much more capacity to use the machinery falls to the person who integrates himself with it uncomplainingly, so that the correspondence between the listener's consciousness and the fetishized music would still remain comprehensible even if the former did not unequivocally reduce itself to the latter.

The counterpart of the fetishism of music is a regression of listening. This does not mean a relapse of the individual listener into an earlier phase of his own development, nor a decline in the collective general level, since the millions who are reached musically for he first time by today's mass communications cannot be compared with the audience of the past. Rather, it is contemporary listening which has regressed, arrested at the infantile stage. Not only do the listening subjects lose, along with freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for conscious perception of music, which was from time immemorial confined to a narrow group, but they stubbornly reject the possibility of such perception. They fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition. They listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear, but precisely in this dissociation they develop certain capacities which accord less with the concepts of traditional aesthetics than with those of football and motoring. They are not childlike, as might be expected on the basis of an interpretation of the new type of listener in terms of the introduction to musical life of groups previously unacquainted with music. But they are childish; their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded . Whenever they have a chance, they display the pinched hatred of those who really sense the other but exclude it in order to life in peace, and who therefore would like best to root out the nagging possibility. The regression is really from this existent possibility, or more concretely, from the possibility of a different and oppositional music. Regressive, too, is the role which contemporary mass music plays in the psychological household of its victims. They are not merely turned away from more important music, but they are confirmed in their neurotic stupidity, quite irrespective of how their musical capacities are related to the specific musical culture of earlier social phases.

Adorno, Theodore, from the same essay as the last several posts.

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Please pay special attention to the video at 2:06. There our Beat Kidz reporter got it slightly wrong. That is not the sound an oppressed person makes. It is the sound a person makes in opposition to oppression. The sound of Charles Gayle. The sound of Albert Ayler. The sound of John Coltrane. While all three had a boot on their neck in one form or another, I don't think of any of them as oppressed. Certainly when you are making that sound, you aren't oppressed--if anything, you are doing the oppressing!

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It suffices to remember how many sorrows he is spared who no longer thinks too many thoughts, how much more "in accordance with reality" a person behaves when he affirms that the real is right, how much more capacity to use the machinery falls to the person who integrates himself with it uncomplainingly,

Questions? Comments?

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their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded . Whenever they have a chance, they display the pinched hatred of those who really sense the other but exclude it in order to life in peace, and who therefore would like best to root out the nagging possibility.

What strikes me here is that Adorno isn't calling anyone stupid, despite the part about forced retardation. If you really stretch, you can read the forced retardation and pinched hatred as a coping mechanism--"in order to live life in peace."

Speaking of stretch, it is kind of a stretch to think that "those who really sense the other" merit "pinched hatred"--as if hatred of the people who really sense the other could possibly extinguish "the other" or the "nagging possibility" thereof.

Lord knows people love them some hating, especially that which resides outside the assumed. In the words of Milford Graves "those who know not that they know not are fools, avoid them."

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The regression is really from this existent possibility, or more concretely, from the possibility of a different and oppositional music.

Can't we just get rid of "music" and go with "The regression is really from the possibility of difference and opposition"?

EYES RIGHT! Sgt Shamar Thomas, USMC and The Revealation of Self-Production and The Unity That is Realized in Precisely that Spontaneity

2011-10-18T18:23:00.000-07:00

The contradictions of the musical material are so inexorably resolved in the moment of sound that it never arrives at the synthesis, the self-production of the work, which reveals the meaning of every Beethoven symphony. What is the point of the symphonic effort when the material on which that effort was to be tested has already been ground up? The protective fixation of the work leads to its destruction, for its unity is realized in precisely that spontaneity which is sacrificed to the fixation. This last fetishism, which seizes on the substance itself, smothers it; the absolute adjustment of the appearance to the work denies the latter and makes it disappear unnoticed behind the apparatus, just as certain swamp-drainings by labour detachments take place not for their own sake but for that of the work. Not for nothing does the rule of the established conductor remind one of that of the totalitarian Fuhrer. Like the latter, he reduces aura and organization to a common denominator. He is the real modern type of the virtuoso, as band leader as well as in the Philharmonic. He has got to the point where he no longer has to do anything himself; he is even sometimes relieved of reading the score by the staff musical advisors. At one stroke he provides norm and individualisation; the norm is identified with his person, and the individual tricks which he perpetrates furnish general rules. The fetish character of the conductor is the most obvious and the most hidden. The standard works could probably be performed by the virtuosi of contemporary orchestras just as well without the conductor, and the public which cheers the conductor would be unable to tell that, in the concealment of the orchestra, the musical advisor was taking the place of the hero laid low by a cold.

The consciousness of the mass of listeners is adequate to fetishized music. It listens according to formula, and indeed debasement itself would not be possible if resistance ensued, if the listeners still had the capacity to make demands beyond the limits of what was supplied.

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What is the point of the symphonic effort when the material on which that effort was to be tested has already been ground up

Ground up...ground up? Ground up, like, pre-chewed, like notated? Is Adorno talking about our beloved Free music?

* * *

The protective fixation of the work leads to its destruction, for its unity is realized in precisely that spontaneity which is sacrificed to the fixation...This last fetishism, which seizes on the substance itself, smothers it.

So what you're saying is that unity is realized in spontaneity, and that said spontaneity is killed by protective fixation? And this protective fixation fetish...you say it siezes and smothers?

You mean like a bunch of NYPD in riot gear insisting people walk on the sidewalk during a demonstration against deth-kulture ultra wicked mega greed, lest some kind of spontaneous, unscripted, self-organized oration by USMC Iraq veteran occur, goes viral and unites otherwise disperate groups and opinion against the 1%'s fuckery?

Did I get that right?

* * *

He has got to the point where he no longer has to do anything himself; he is even sometimes relieved of reading the score by the staff musical advisors. At one stroke he provides norm and individualisation; the norm is identified with his person, and the individual tricks which he perpetrates furnish general rules.

What percentage of Fortune 500 ceo's does this accurately describe? How about past Presidents of the United States?

* * *

Here's a beautiful passage for ya

The standard works could probably be performed by the virtuosi of contemporary orchestras just as well without the conductor, and the public which cheers the conductor would be unable to tell that, in the concealment of the orchestra, the musical advisor was taking the place of the hero laid low by a cold

"Taking the place of a hero laid low by a cold." How accurate is that translation? Does it matter? You got to love Adorno's ultra indirectness. In New Jersey talk, it would go something like this:

the public which cheers the conductor would be unable to tell that, in the concealment of the orchestra, the musical advisor was ~~taking the place of he hero laid low by a cold~~ a douche bag.

Zooming out, do notice Adorno's critique of the conductor and the assessment that plenty of music can be made without one. To follow our occupy shit on a police car street theme, does anyone else out there ever wonder what so-called "normal" daily routines could be conducted without the presence of "protective fixation" as expressed by, say, an absence of police brutality?

Would people still go to their shitty jobs if the police weren't out there in riot gear with truncheons in hand? Would people still go to their really great jobs? Would people continue to serve the deth-kulture?

If people could people could be assured peaceful demonstrations would not result in brutalisation by the police, do you think the government would be more or less responsive to the people it "governs?" Would the people be more or less inclined to engage in demonstration and the civic process?

* * *

The consciousness of the mass of listeners is adequate to fetishized music. It listens according to formula, and indeed debasement itself would not be possible if resistance ensued, if the listeners still had the capacity to make demands beyond the limits of what was supplied.

The taste of the mass of eaters is adequate to genetically modified corporate food products served in chain restaurants.

The consciousness of the mass of news readers is adequate to for-profit news magazines created by multinational media conglomerates with their own agendas wholly unrelated to a full and thorough telling of the news.

The aesthetics of the mass of home owners is adequate to the abundance of hideously ugly and poor functioning housing stock in our most glamorous cities.

The unimagination of the mass of entertainment consumers is adequate to the glut of unimaginative music, theatre, literature and television choking their respective distribution mechanisms (cf. swamp-drainings by labour detachments taking place not for their own sake but for that of the work)

10/10/11. God is Dead. Occupy Wall Street. Shit On Police Car. Wipe Ass with New York Times.

2011-10-10T22:10:00.000-07:00

The practice of arrangement comes from salon music. It is the practice of refined entertainment which borrows its pretensions from the niveau of cultural goods, but transforms these into entertainment material of the type of hit songs. Such entertainment, formerly reserved as an accompaniment to peoples humming, today spreads over the whole of musical life, which is bascially not taken seriously by anyone anymore and in all discussion of culture retreats further and further into the background. One has the choice of either dutifully going along with the business, if only furtively in front of the loud speaker on Saturday afternoon, or at once stubbornly and impenitently acknowledging the trash served up for the ostensible or real needs of the masses. The uncompelling and superficial nature of the objects of refined entertainment inevitably leads to the inatentiveness of the listeners. One preserves a good conscience in the matter since one is offering the listeners first-class goods. To the objection that these are already a drug on the market, one is read with the reply that this is what they wanted, an argument which can be finally invalidated by a diagnosis of the situation of the listeners but only through insight into the whole process which unites producers and consumers in a diabolical harmony.

But fetishism takes hold of even the ostensibly serious practice of music, which mobilizes the pathos of distance against refined entertainment. The purity of service to the cause, with which it presents the works, often turns out to be as inimical to them as vulgarization and arrangement. The official ideal of performance, which covers the earth as a result of Toscanini's extraordinary achievement, helps to sanction a condition which, in phrase of Eduard Steuermann, may be called the barbarism of perfection. To be sure, the names of famous works are no longer made fetishes, although the lesser ones that break into the programs almost make the limitation to the smaller repertoire seem desirable. To be sure, passages are not here inflated or climaxes overstressed for the sake of fascination. There is iron discipline. But precisely iron. The new fetish is the flawlessly functioning, metallically brilliant apparatus as such, in which all the cogwheels mesh so perfectly that not the slightest hole remains open for the meaning of the whole. Perfect, immaculate performance in the latest style preserves the work at the price of its definitive reification. It presents it as already complete from the very first note. The performance sounds like its own phonograph record. They dynamic is so predetermined that there are no longer any tensions at all.

Thedore Adorno, Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening

+ + +

"The Barbarism of Perfection." Love that.

"The uncompelling and superficial nature of the objects of refined entertainment inevitably leads to the inatentiveness of the listeners." Love that too.

What about the uncompelling and superficial nature of the news coverage by refined corporations. Does that lead to a certain inatentiveness?

+ + +

Anyone else digging Occupy Wall Street? For the first time since I left the City of Piss, I wish I was back in the City of Piss. For the first time in my life, I wish I was on Wall Street, which apparently is now Take a Shit on a Police Car Street. (Not that taking a shit on a police car is all that unusual in lower Manhattan.)

Sure. Why not. Is it really any worst than the shitting-upon all but the richest 1% have taken for the last decade?

Speaking of shit upon, did you read this piece of shit coverage in the New York Times? Go ahead, click on it. Read it. Feel it. Thanks for sharing Gina!

I get the feeling that because the content of the protest isn't buffed to a Toscanini sheen--that the protest isn't "already complete from first note", that some (like writers for the New York Times) somehow feel they are off the hook from looking deeper into the impetus for those protests, and so can instead write some snotty-ass twaddle for their big important journalism job.

[Right now, as I type this, the main story on the home page of the New York Times is this pitiful piece of shit--a story about a boy who stutters and his history teacher who won't call on him.]

So let me get this straight...the biggest super theft of all time ever happens on Wall Street in the midst of how many US wars? Three? And at this very moment, there are protesters protesting that super wickedness and we get a story about stutters and the mean history teachers who won't call on them in class, even when their hand has been raised for a really long time!

Judith Miller aside, what then is the credibility of the New York Times? We give a shit about what it says why?

More to the point, what then is the credibility of the New York Times when it comes to writing about our beloved Free Jazz--or any gesture that resides outside the parent culture's yoke?

Yes, yes, Ben Ratliff, very nice...but like, The New York Times you suck. Hey Downbeat--you suck too! Hey Wall Street, you really suck, and you deserve every drop of piss and shit the occupiers place upon you.

You are on the wrong team. All your content, no matter what the intent, no matter how well meaning, no matter now meticulously worded and proof read, no matter how inspired your journalism teacher made you feel, your content and reputation is smeared with the ass-filth of death kulture boot licking and kow towing to the very forces that have ruined everything.

So write about Wynton. Or opera at the met. Or some fluff piece about stuttering. Or some cynical snotty shitty piece about Occupy Take-a-Shit-On-A-Police-Car Street.

Stay away from This Music--a music that was born, in no small part, out of a contempt, nay, a loathing, for all the things you cherish and the insipid cloying way you cherish them.

It saddens me to no end that there are musicians and organisations dedicated to the needs and employment of musicians, who do great works for humanity and yet continue to peg their self worth to column inches in any for-profit magazine--not just the known time wasting supporters of all things death.

Though probably not one of their stated objectives, I see Occupy of Take-a-Shit-on-a-Police-Car-Street as, in part, a protest against exchange-value's encroachment into the world of use-value.

For those of you foolish enough to confess out loud an interest in Art, be it our beloved "Free" music, or painting, or what have you, here's a little tip: Once you're caring about what the New York Times has to say about anything, you have the shit of exchange-value on your shoe. Stop everything and scrape it off.

For those of you foolish enough to conflate art and commerce, once you view the "success" of your Art-enterprise as parallel to the opinions and attentions of the New York Times, Downbeat, or any for profit publication of/by/for the Death Kulture, immediate action must be taken to save your soul.

Self loathing of the future will be all the more if your time now is spent clinging to the same old wretched iterations of the same old wretched exploitation when new modalities (like the blog, for one) are constantly availing themselves.

Large Fry, Small Fry

2011-07-13T15:01:00.000-07:00

Before the theological caprices of commodities, the consumers become temple slaves. Those who sacrifice themselves nowhere else can do so here, and here they are fully betrayed.

In the commodity fetishists of the new model, in the "sadomasochistic character," in those receptive to today's mass art, the same thing shows itself in many ways. The masochistic mass culture is the necessary manifestation of almighty production itself. When the feelings seize on exchange-value it is no mystical transubstantiation. It corresponds to the behavior of the prisoner who loves his cell because he has been left nothing else to love. The sacrifice of individuality, which accommodates itself to the regularity of the successful, the doing of what everybody does, follows from the basic fact that in broad areas the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods. But the commercial necessity of concealing this identity leads to the manipulation of taste and the offical culture's pretense of individualism, which necessarily increases in proportion to the liquidation of the individual. Even in the realm of the superstructure, the appearance is not merely the concealment of the essence, but proceeds of necessity from the essence itself. The identical character of the goods which everyone must buy hides itself behind the rigor of the universally compulsory style. The fiction of the relation between supply and demand survives in the fictitiously individual nuances.

If the value of taste in the present situation is questioned, it is necessary to understand what taste is composed of in this situation. Acquiescence is rationalized as modesty, opposition to caprice and anarchy; musical analysis has today decayed as fundamentally as musical charm, and has its parody in the stubborn counting of beats. The picture is completed by accidental differentiation within the strict confines of the prescribed. But if the liquidated individual really makes the complete superficiality of the conventions passionately his own, then the golden age of taste has dawned at the very moment in which taste no longer exists. The works which are the basis of the fetishization and become cultural goods experience constitutional changes as a result. They become vulgarized. Irrelevant consumption destroys them. Not merely do the few things played again and again wear out, like the Sistine Madonna in the bedroom, but reification affects their internal structure. They are transformed into a conglomeration of irruptions which are impressed on the listeners by climax and repetition, while the organization of the whole makes no impression whatsoever.

+ + +

How is everyone's Jazz Festival Season going?

The sacrifice of individuality, which accommodates itself to the regularity of the successful, the doing of what everybody does, follows from the basic fact that in broad areas the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods.

As we continue to limp around the cul de sac of routinized expression, it is at once reassuring and sickening to continue seeing phrases like "Ornetteish" and "Coltrane inspired" and the like still in use as sales tools.

Sometimes I wonder if festival organizers look at the event as a giant "pie" with each slice representing a different special interest group within the larger "Jazz" community. A teensy slice goes to the banjos and arm band guys, another slice goes to the lady singers in lamay gowns, a big slice goes to the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and another portion goes to "bears riding bicycles" contingent--those musicians who otherwise would be totally ignored and insignificant were it not for their exotic passports or other non-musical curiosity.

While the size of the pie slices (and who does the slicing) is always of interest, even more so is this notion that there is a known number of pie slices, and the importance of having the same number of pie slices at each festival...the notion of "something for everyone"--namely the same something.

This year, the wonderfully musical and eminently talented Jonas Kullhammar comes to mind. He's one of this seasons "hard blowing post Coltrane" pie slices. At present he is enjoying the North American Jazz Festival circuit. One need only watch this to understand why...consummate, top notch musicianship. For reals!

That said, I know at least one former community college instructor, living quietly and working barely in jolly olde Portland Oregon who could, in his sweatpants before he first beer of the day, take Mr. Kullhammar to the ol' woodshed and rip him to gossamer ribbons of government subsidised simulacra. But then, said former community college instructor is old, not cute, no extensive jazz-on-vinyl collection, no charming website--just some guy who did a few gigs with Booker Ervin in Italy, has taught for decades, can play Confirmation (which he learned by ear) in all 12 keys at tempo from memory--you know, all the musicality with none of the novelty...all the use value with none of the exchange value...

Not that the world need be seen as a gigantic cutting contest, of course, and really, when it comes to music, there should be work enough for all.

But the commercial necessity of concealing this identity leads to the manipulation of taste and the official culture's pretense of individualism, which necessarily increases in proportion to the liquidation of the individual.

The pretense of individualism... How many guys out there are "hard blowing, post Coltrane tenormen?" (I wish they covered that in the Census.) How many more do we need? How about "Ornetteish" alto players? Can we ever have too many of those? If you are immediately recognisable as "post Coltrane," or "Ornetteish" just how individual are you?

But if the liquidated individual really makes the complete superficiality of the conventions passionately his own, then the golden age of taste has dawned at the very moment in which taste no longer exists.

Those are the passages that make Adorno so darn adorable!

If the above is true (death of taste) then it has been true for quite a while. It is also true that the the overwhelming shrillness of said truth is on the increase.

Could it be said that an individual's "success" is based upon his or her ability to fully grasp and own the superficialities of the conventions within their given vocation?

Do the people who reject the superficialities of the conventions within their given vocation ever become CEO? How about VP of Sales? How about booking agencies? Do they promote or ignore those unwilling or unable to embrace the superficiality of those conventions around him/her?

How long can a music built upon wilful embrace of the superficiality of conventions last? How long can a culture built upon wilful embrace of the superficiality of conventions last?

Exchange Value Destroys Use Value

2011-06-07T22:11:00.000-07:00

The change in the function of music involves the basic condition of the relation between art and society. The more inexorably the principle of exchange-value destroys use-values for human beings, the more deeply does exchange-value disguise itself as the object of enjoyment. It has been asked what the cement is which still holds the world of commodities together. The answer is that this transfer of the use-value of consumption goods to their exchange-value contributes to a general order in which eventually every pleasure which emancipates itself from exchange-value takes on subversive features. The appearance of exchange-value in commodities has taken on a specific cohesive function. The woman who has money with which to buy is intoxicated by the act of buying. In American conventional speech, having a good time means being present at the enjoyment of others, which in its turn has as its only content being present. The auto religion makes all men brothers in the sacramental moment with the words: "That is a Rolls Royce," and in moments of intimacy, women attach greater importance to the hairdressers and cosmeticians than to the situation for the sake of which the hairdressers and cosmeticians are employed. The relation to the irrelevant dutifully manifests its social essence. The couple out driving who spend their time identifying every passing car and being happy if they recognize the trademarks speeding by, the girl whose satisfaction consists solely in the fact that she and her boyfriend "look good," the expertise of the jazz enthusiast who legitimizes himself by having knowledge about what is in any case inescapable: all this operates according to the same command. Before the theological caprices of commodities, the consumers become temple slaves.

Theodore Adorno, Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening

+ + +

Did you hear? Exchange value destroys use value. Says so in this sentence right here:

The more inexorably the principle of exchange-value destroys use-values for human beings, the more deeply does exchange-value disguise itself as the object of enjoyment.

Sure there's some words before and after, but in the middle, like the salami in the sandwhich, it says exchange-value destroys use value(s). It also says the more deeply it does so, the more deeply it (exchange value) disguises itself as the object of enjoyment.

Arena rock?

Area rock really started to pick up steam right around when Reagan started to pick up steam. That's fair to say, no? Certainly after Reagan, going to see "Arena Rock" was definitely more about the spectacle-as-object-of-enjoyment because after Reagan, all the music you'd hear in an area sounded more or less the same anyway.

It could be this describes the phenomena of the latter day Grateful Dead. The thing was to go to a "Dead Show" (and buy things), regardless of the musical content which, by Reagan, had degenerated beyond recognition.

Festivals stir exchange value feelings of suspicion and mild loathing. The loathing I think comes more from curation-as-discourse-of-power--and I'm not necessarily saying the curator is the one with the power. Perhaps it is, perhaps it's the bank that puts up the money. Is any of that left to chance in the bigger, exchange-value focused exciting summer Jazz festivals? Are choices of who gets to participate, where and when ever taken lightly, or given up to chance?

The more exchange-value destroys use-values at festivals, the more the festival refers to its self as "a great festival" where just "being at the festival" is experience enough.

In sum, I think we can all safely say Adorno got this one completely correct.

The Truth About Tuxedos

2011-06-05T19:56:00.000-07:00

For all contemporary musical life is dominated by the commodity form; the last pre-capitalist residues have been eliminated. Music, with all the attributes of the etheral and sublime which are generously accorded it, serves in America today as an advertisement for commodities which one must acquire in order to be able to hear music. If the advertising function is carefully dimmed in the case of serious music, it always breaks through in the case of light music. The whole jazz business, with its free distribution of scores to bands, has abandoned the idea that actual performance promotes the sale of piano scores and phonograph records. Countless hit song texts praise the hit songs themselves, repeating their titles in capital letters. What makes it appearance, like an idol, out of such masses of type is the exchange-value in which the quantum of possible enjoyment has disappeared. Marx defines the fetish character of the commodity as the veneration of the thing made by oneself which, as exchange-value, simultaneously alienates itself from producer to consumer--"human beings." "A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor." This is the real secret of success. It is the mere reflection of what one pays in the market for the product. The consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the ticket to the Toscanini concert. He has literally "made" the success which he reifies and accepts as an object criterion, without recognizing himself in it. But he has not "made" it by liking the concert, but rather by buying the ticket. To be sure, exchange-value exerts its power in a special way in the realm of cultural goods.

Theodore Adorno, On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.

+ + +

"pre-capitalist residues"...what must those have been like? This is where Adorno moves a little too quickly for a mental sloth like myself. Is he talking about conditions related to the creation of the music? That residue? Is he talking about the actual sound of the music itself? Is he talking about how the music was disseminated into the world?

If the advertising function is carefully dimmed in the case of serious music,

lol! You mean like this? It's as of the advertising function has taken on a life of its own. It's like wild yeast--its in the air, touching everything. Once the conditions are right (like someone wants to pay for the music) the yeast explode like a bad case of Candida. So long as no one gives a shit (money wise), said advertising function can remains comfortably in the dim-to-off position.

The whole jazz business, with its free distribution of scores to bands, has abandoned the idea that actual performance promotes the sale of piano scores and phonograph records.

Mind you, this was written in 1938. Oh how I would love to exhume Adorno's body and visit him during office hours to see what he makes of Jazz today. Assuming of course there still such a thing as a "jazz business", taking into account the myriad of difficulties and issues peppering the word "jazz", is it fair to say that "it" has abandoned the idea that actual performance promotes the sale of CD's? Or has the live jazz inc. reality octapussed out into a far more diabolical merchandising menace? This is one of those I'm really asking times...have things changed since Adorno's time, or have they only gotten worse?

The consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the ticket to the Toscanini concert.

Gotta love that. Adorno at his best. Here's another I'm really asking question: who else in contemporary cultural criticism is using such pointed hurt words? Is anyone out there in PhD land shining their light of darkness on ticket prices to see Abba on Broadway or U-2 in Space or whatever? Or does that qualify as "light music" and as such, is privy to an entirely different kind of invective?

Is there an equivalent in Jazz? I remember seeing Mal Waldron at Sweet Basil way back when and coming away with $0.00 after the experience was done. 20 some years later, at those prices, I still can't afford to be a regular participant in seeing "Jazz" at the big money clubs. Not that big money clubs are the be-all and end-all of seeing "Jazz"--and verily I've seen a lot of great "Jazz" at the William Patterson College Jazz Room Series, and at the same time, there has been a lot of great Jazz that happened at the Blue Note when I was living in New York that I didn't see. Win some, lose some.

+ + +

At the top you see at gentleman in a Darth Vader outfit "busking." He is doing so about 2 blocks away from the parliament building. At the time, Cattle Ranchers were at parliament expressing their concerns and sharing their joys and sorrows in hopes that the boot of policy and funding and market realities might be lifted ever so slightly to promote a more amicable business climate, particularly for the "little guy."

While I support cattle ranchers 100% and while I believe 100% that we as a civilization undervalue the epically important contribution the farmer makes to our very existence, I did find myself wondering when the last time was a cattle rancher had to do their thing for donations on the street corner dressed like Darth Vader? I also wondered (aloud) when musicians were going to get to speak (as a bloc) to parliament about what it's like to be a musician, and how "unfair" it is that we have to do something other than music to make our economic way in the world.

Darth Vader had some insights. Here is where I wish I had a hand held digital recorder. I am misquoting him here:

"Why even bother? We live in a conservative regime. There is no money for music and arts. They took that all away. Besides, I'd rather be here making connection with people like you and doing this than on the stage in a tuxedo like some kind of egomaniac attention pig asshole."

I did get the "attention pig asshole" part correct though. I remember that to the word.

Billions of people live a happy life never eating beef ever. How many people live a happy life never listening to music?

Business Extending Peacefully

2011-05-21T17:00:00.000-07:00

The world of that musical life, the composition business which extends peacefully from Irving Berlin and Walter Donaldson--"the world's best composer"--by way of Gershwin, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky to Schubert's B Minor Symphony, labelled The Unfinished, is one of fetishes. The star principle has become totalitarian. The reactions of the listeners appear to have no relation to the playing of the music. They have reference, rather, to the cumulative success which, for its part, cannot be thought of unalienated by the past spontaneities of listeners, but instead dates back to the command of publishers, sound film magnates and rulers of radio. Famous people are not the only stars. Works begin to take on the same role. A pantheon of best-sellers builds up. The programs shrink, and the shrinking process not only removes the moderately good, but the accepted classics themselves undergo a selection that has nothing to do with quality. In America, Beethoven's Fourth Symphony is among the rarities. This selection reproduces itself in a fatal circle; the most familiar is the most successful and is therefore played again and again and made still more familiar. The choice of the standard works is itself in terms of their "effectiveness" for programmatic fascination, in terms of the categories of success as determined by light music or permitted by the star conductors. The climaxes of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony are placed on the same level as the unspeakable horn melody from the slow movement of Tchaikovsky's Fifth. Melody comes to mean eight-beat symmetrical treble melody. This is catalogued as the composer's "idea" which one things he can put in his pocket and take home, just as it is ascribed to the composer as his basic property.

Theodore Adorno, Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening

+ + +

Does anyone else feel like Adorno is now just starting to take off the gloves?

the composition business which extends peacefully from Irving Berlin and Walter Donaldson--"the world's best composer"--by way of Gershwin, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky to Schubert's B Minor Symphony, labelled The Unfinished, is one of fetishes.

You gotta love the phrase "which extends peacefully." So many delicious layers of angry loathing disgust for the culture industry.

Gloves-off Adorno is a little more direct in his language. It isn't too far a leap to suggest a possible rephrasing could be

One fetish of composition business is that of "world's best composer."

The first Grammy awards were held in 1959--well after the publication of this essay. If only Adorno were alive today! And then of course there is his notion of the "star principle" having become totalitarian.

I wonder if by "totalitarian" he means not going away but instead ever increasing in its oppressive cultural centrality? Do you think Adorno had any idea there would ever be a Paris Hilton and a Jersey Shore and all the rest? I'm not trying to cast jugement here, I'm just trying to imagine (with your help, of course) if Adorno really knew just how big the "star principle" totalitarian flower would bloom.

Then of course, there's Adorno's break down of that...thing...we all know is there, but pretend isn't, or don't know how to verbalise, or are afraid to verbalise. Let's read it again:

This selection reproduces itself in a fatal circle; the most familiar is the most successful and is therefore played again and again and made still more familiar

Like, doesn't that happen everywhere, in every industry? Does it happen in restaurants? Does it happen in fashion? Does it happen in the production of televised news programs? How about print media? How about at the meat counter at your supermarket? When was the last time you've seen a Hanger Steak? When was the last time you've eaten a Hanger Steak? Enough with the New York steak already!

And to think of the gigantic amount of creative energy that goes into sounding "familiar"--like a planet earth sized big-gulp of semen trying to penetrate the "Familiar" egg, but instead of sperm it's people's careers and lots of real-estate all over the world.

What if all that energy and capital was directed in the opposite direction? ALL CREATIVE CAPITAL WILL NO LONGER STRIVE FOR FAMILIAR, CREATIVE CAPITAL SHALL NOW STRIVE FOR THE OPPOSITE. Grand prise goes to that which is unlike anything else, but still functions.

Or not. See what I care.

Lastly, Adorno speaks eloquently (if indirectly) on behalf of musicians

Melody comes to mean eight-beat symmetrical treble melody. This is catalogued as the composer's "idea" which one things he can put in his pocket and take home, just as it is ascribed to the composer as his basic property

The emphasis on symmetrical is mine. (Could you tell?)

Is it because there is no symmetry in life that "we" love the symmetrical in music? Is it because there is no symmetry in life that "we" hate the symmetrical in music?

I know I hate ownership in music--especially when the owner is someone other than he or she who performed the labour creating said owned music. If the best I can do is hate symmetry in melody because of its ease of ownership, then that's fine too.

The Illusion, The Understanding

2011-05-15T21:21:00.000-07:00

The illusion of a social preference for light music as against serious is based on that passivity of the masses which makes the consumption of light music contradict the objective interest of those who consume it. It is claimed that they actually like light music and listen to the higher type only for reasons of social prestige, when acquaintance with the text of a single hit song suffices to reveal the sole function this object of honest approbation can perform. The unity of the two spheres of music is thus that of an unresolved contradiction. They do not hang together in such a way that the lower could serve as a sort of popular introduction to the higher, or that the higher could renew its lost collective strength by borrowing from the lower. The whole can not be put together by adding the separated halves, but in both there appear, however distantly, the changes of the whole, which only moves in contradiction. If the flight from the banal becomes definitive, if the marketability of the serious product shrinks to nothing, in consequence of its objective demands, then on the lower level the effect of the standardisation of successes means it is no longer possible to succeed in an old style, but only in imitation as such. Between incomprehensibility and inescapability, there is no third way; the situation has polarised itself into extremes which actually meet. There is no room between them for the "individual." The latter's claims, wherever they still occur, are illusory, being copied from the standards. The liquidation of the individual is the real signature of the new musical situation.

If the two spheres of music are stirred up in the unity of their contradiction, the demarcation line between them varies. The advanced product has renounced consumption. The rest of serious music is delivered over to consumption for the price of its wages. It succumbs to commodity listening. The differences in the reception of official "classical" music and light music no longer have any real significance. They are only still manipulated for reasons of marketability. The hit song enthusiast must be reassured that his idols are not too elevated for him, just as the visitor to philharmonic concerts is confirmed in his status. The more industriously the trade erects wire fences between the music provinces, the greater the suspicion that without these, the inhabitants could all to easily come to an understanding.

Theodore Adorno, Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening

+ + +

They do not hang together in such a way that the lower could serve as a sort of popular introduction to the higher, or that the higher could renew its lost collective strength by borrowing from the lower.

To that I would add "despite their best efforts." I feel like popular music has borrowed from "higher" music and that "higher" music is all too ready to debase itself with "lower" musical vehicles and programming. I'm not sure who was the pitcher and who was the catcher, but on 04/21/1999 and 04/22/1999 Metallica did a recording with the San Francisco. I believe the recording is called S&M.

Who is the "higher" and who is the "lower?" If Metallica is the "lower" (and I'm not saying they are) have they served as a popular introduction to the higher? After purchasing and listening to Metallica's S&M went out and bought Charles Ives' Second Orchestral Set? Boulez piano sonatas?

Looking the other way, did "higher" music renew its lost collective strength after borrowing from Metallica? What changed at the SF Symphony? No, wait, let me rephrase that...what changed for the better?

if the marketability of the serious product shrinks to nothing, in consequence of its objective demands, then on the lower level the effect of the standardisation of successes means it is no longer possible to succeed in an old style, but only in imitation as such.

Who else loves how Adorno attributes demands to music. Did I say that right? How Adorno suggests that a music can have "objective demands"--and that one of those "objective demands" is that the marketability of the "serious product" shrink to nothing--that to be a serious product means to evade marketability. I'd say our beloved improvised music/This Music/Crazy Experimental Freedom fulfils that requirement.

Mean while in high earning "low" music land, all the hot new stars on the cover of Spin Magazine and Wire and Readers Digest are making a fraction of the money with none of the excitement of The Beatles. Poor things.

The advanced product has renounced consumption. The rest of serious music is delivered over to consumption for the price of its wages. It succumbs to commodity listening.

There again with the "product" doing the renouncing. And there with a division between the "advanced" product and the rest of "serious" music that is delivered over to commodity listening. Is that like listening in to music on the subway on the way to work?

The differences in the reception of official "classical" music and light music no longer have any real significance. They are only still manipulated for reasons of marketability. The hit song enthusiast must be reassured that his idols are not too elevated for him, just as the visitor to philharmonic concerts is confirmed in his status.

This was written in 1938.

The more industriously the trade erects wire fences between the music provinces, the greater the suspicion that without these, the inhabitants could all to easily come to an understanding.

Which brings me to Fay Victor and Other Dimensions in Music. Now, not that they are inhabitants of two wildly different provinces, but on the record Kaiso Story the combination of Mary Ann with what ODIM does as ODIM is evidence that understandings can be reached.

Adorno, Phoebe Snow, and the Colors of Spring--Emo Mix

2011-05-10T13:11:00.000-07:00

If asceticism once struck down the claims of the esthetic in a reactionary way, it has today become the sign of advanced art: not, to be sure, by an archaicizing parsimony of means in which deficiency and poverty are manifested, but by the strict exclusion of all culinary delights which seek to be consumed immediately for their own sake, as if in art the sensory were not the bearer of something intellectual which only shows itself in the whole rather than in isolated, topical moments. Art records negatively just that possibility of happiness which the only partially positive anticipation of happiness ruinously confronts today. All "light" and pleasant art has become illusory and mendacious. What makes its appearance esthetically in the pleasure categories can no longer give pleasure, and the promise of happiness, once the definition of art, can no longer be found except where the mask has been torn from the countenance of false happiness. Enjoyment still retains a place only in the immediate bodily presence. Where it requires an esthetic appearance, it is illusory by esthetic standards and likewise cheats the pleasure-seeker out of itself. Only where its appearance is lacking is the faith in its possibility maintained.

The new phase of the musical consciousness of the masses is defined by displeasure in pleasure. It resembles the reaction to sport of advertising. The words "enjoyment of art" sound funny. If in nothing else, Schonberg's music resembles popular songs in refusing to be enjoyed. Whoever still delights in the beautiful passages of a Schubert quartet or even in the provocatively heatlhy fare of a Handel concerto grosso, ranks as a would-be guarding of culture among the buterfuly collectors. What condemns him as an epicure is not perhaps "new." The power of the street ballad, the catchy tune and all the swarming forms of the banal has made itself felt since the beginning of the bourgeois era. Formerly, it attacked the cultural privilege of the ruling class. But today, when that power of the banal extends over the entire society, its function has changed. This change of function affects all music, not only light music, in whose realm it could comfortably enough be made innocuous. The diverse spheres of music must be through of together. Their static separation, which certain caretakers of culture have ardently sought--the totalitarian radio was assigned to the task, on the one hand, of providing good entertainment and diversion, and on the other, of fostering the so-called cultural goods, as if there could still be good entertainment and as if the cultural goods were not, by their administration, transformed into evils--the neat parcelling out of music's social field of force is illusionary.

Just as the history of serious music since Mozart as a flight from the banal reflects in reverse the outlines of light music, so today, in its key representatives, it gives an account of the ominous experiences which appear even in the unsuspecting innocence of light music. It would be just as easy to go in the other direction and conceal the break between the two spheres, assuming a continuum which permits a progressive education leading safely from commercial jazz and hit songs to cultural commodities. Cynical barbarism is no better than cultural dishonesty. What it accomplishes by disillusion on the higher level, it balances by the ideologies of primitivism and return to nature, with which it glorifies the musical underworld; an underworld which has long since ceased to assist the opposition of those excluded from culture to find expression, and now only lives on what is handed down to it from above.

Theodore Adorno, Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening.

+ + +

Did you hear Phoebe Snow died? Perhaps you, like me, read it in the NY Times. For reasons I can't quite comprehend myself, I was deeply saddened to hear of Ms. Snow's passing. That sadness conveniently and quickly gave way to disgust upon reading the Times' obituary, particularly:

After 1975, motherhood took precedence over Ms. Snow’s career. Her album “Second Childhood,” a moody follow-up to “Phoebe Snow” released by Columbia in 1976, was certified gold, with sales of over 500,000, but it was still considered a commercial disappointment.

Can you fucking imagine? Yeeaahh, well, sorry Phoebe, but those 500,000 units...very disappointing. We're going to have to drop you like a hot potato. Thanks for all your hard work and all the best to you in the future.

Add to that

Her changing labels while owing money to them led to years of legal battles and financial hardship. “With my quick success, I didn’t have time to learn the ropes of the music business,” she told The Times in 1983. “Because my first record was such a hit, I was terribly spoiled and I thought I couldn’t do anything wrong. I was also desperate to make tons of money because of my responsibility to my daughter. And there was no longer any joy in making music.”

Heya Culture industry, job well done, I'd say.

Those of you who aren't familiar with said responsibilities to her daughter, here again from the same obit:

“I’ve finally settled into realizing that my daughter is what she is,” she told The New York Times in 1983. “Any progress she makes is fantastic, but I no longer foresee any miracles happening. I went through phases of the occult and of trying to find every single doctor in the country who could possibly do something. I realize now that I can’t move mountains.”

Refusing to institutionalize Valerie, who suffered from hydrocephalus and was not expected to live long, Ms. Snow cared for her daughter until her death on March 18, 2007, at age 31.

What a life. The insult of industry shit bags atop the monumental struggles of a profoundly disabled daughter ending in death. As an old Italian neighbour (also from New Jersey) once said to me back in 5th grade when a classmate died "parents aren't supposed to bury their children."

And so we cuddle up to our old friend Teddy for a good glup of truth syrum.

Art records negatively just that possibility of happiness
which the only partially positive anticipation of happiness ruinously confronts today.
All "light" and pleasant art has become illusory and mendacious.

+ + +

Don't get me wrong, I'm going to write in Adorno for president in the 2012 elections, provided they're going to even go through with that charade, but will do so with just a wee bit of hesitation.

Whoever still delights in the beautiful passages of a Schubert quartet or even in the provocatively healthy fare of a Handel concerto grosso, ranks as a would-be guarding of culture among the buterfuly collectors.

I play music each week with a 94 year old pianist. Also in the group is a 86 year old singer. Those two love them some Handel concerto grossos and Schubert quartets. I don't know much about Handel, but if you can believe anything you read, it would appear that Schubert's life was about as fun as Phoebe Snow's. Regardless, if culture were simply guarded by 94 year old pianists and 86 year old singers, that would be one thing. The problems start when Handel concerto grosso's or Schubert quartet's sell luxury sedans and all inclusive golf vacations. C'mon Teddy, don't hate the players, hate the game.

Adorno was also good enough to use the phrase "Totalitarian Radio"--another reason to vote for Adorno in 2012. Furthermore, the point is made that "Totalitarian Radio" was

a: assigned to the task, on the one hand, of providing good entertainment and diversion, and on the other,

b: of fostering the so-called cultural goods, as if there could still be good entertainment

and lastly, Adorno makes the ultimate point "as if the cultural goods were not, by their administration, transformed into evils--the neat parcelling out of music's social field of force is illusionary."

While I agree whole heartedly that once it's on Totalitarian Radio it's over, at the same time I agree more with the notion of "the neat parcelling out of music's social field of force is illusionary."

This of course begets the question of who does the hiring for the job of parcelling out music? Perhaps Teddy answers that later in the essay.

Lastly, let us all come together and feel bad about

an underworld which has long since ceased to assist the opposition of those excluded from culture to find expression, and now only lives on what is handed down to it from above.

Is the "underworld" (of music) as the new middle class of music? Are leather jackets the new Brooks Brothers Blazer? Is there a music under God's great heaven able to resist the teet of the administrated culture industry?

Peek-a-boo! Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening!

2011-04-11T21:54:00.000-07:00

Springtime! Buds on trees, the first flowers of the season beginning to show color. Let's see if we can't re-grey the fields and send those shoots of promise back into the ground with a little negative dialectics from the essay On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening by our old friend Adorno!

The concept of taste is itself outmoded. Responsible art adjusts itself to criteria which approximate judgements: the harmonious and the inharmonious, the correct and the incorrect. But otherwise, no more choices are made; the question is no longer put, and no one demands the subjective justification of the conventions. The very existence of the subject who could verify such taste has become as questionable as has, at the opposite pole, the right to a freedom of choice which empirically, in any case, no one any longer exercises. If one seeks to find out who "likes" a commercial piece, one cannot avoid the suspicion that liking and disliking are inappropriate to the situation, even if the person questioned clothes his reactions in those words. The familiarity of the piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to recognize it. An approach in terms of value judgments has become a fiction for the person who finds himself hemmed in by standardized musical goods. He can neither escape impotence nor decide between the offerings where everything is so completely identical that preference in fact depends merely on biographical details or on the situation in which things are heard. The categories of autonomously oriented art have no applicability to the contemporary reception of music; not even for that of the serious music, domesticated under the barbarous name of classical, so as to enable one to turn away from it again in comfort. If it is objected that specifically light music and everything intended for consumption have in any case never been experienced in terms of those categories, that must certainly be conceded. Nevertheless, such music is also affected by the change in that the entertainment, the pleasure, the enjoyment it promises, is given only to be simultaneously denied. In one of his essays, Aldous Huxley has raised the question of who, in a place of amusement, is really being amused. With the same justice, it can be asked whom music for entertainment still entertains. Rather, it seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people moulded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility.

Theodore Adorno, On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening

+ + +

Responsible art adjusts itself to criteria which approximate judgements.

How does that make everyone feel? Judgements on what subjects...or is that part of the judgement? Judging the appropriate width for pants? Judging the appropriate behaviour in IraqAfganistanLibya? Is judging what to judge part of the judgement of responsible art? How is that expressed in non vocal music? Consonance/dissonance? Tempo? Volume? Does that really do it with any precision? Is doing it with precision really music's job?

Should music made under repressive regimes sound different than music made on floating puffs of spun sugar? Forget should, does music made under repressive regimes sound different than music made on floating puffs of spun sugar? Is music the way people living under repressive regimes escape to their own personal private floating puff of spun sugar?

The very existence of the subject who could verify such taste has become as questionable as has, at the opposite pole, the right to a freedom of choice which empirically, in any case, no one any longer exercises.

One of the things I most love about Adorno is when he whips out the ol' "on the one hand/on the other hand" trick. On the one hand, people capable of verifying taste are few and far between, if they exist at all, and on the other hand, there isn't a lot of "choosing" going on out there anyway (which is to say, why bother verifying the taste of their non judgements?)

Do people really read music criticism and use it to "inform" their taste? Can something someone says change the way you receive a piece of music? Can someone be cured from liking the music of Die Antwoord or Dave Douglas or Ravel through words on a page? Can someone be made to like it through words?

Has anyone else have that recurring dream where all music criticism and music promotion disappears? You know, no more Downbeat, nor more Cadence, no more Signal To Noise, no more Wire, no more glossy posters, no more flash animated web pages...none of that crap.

In that dream, the reason why there was none of that nonsense was because of the super fertility of the music scene and music's treasured place in our culture. No need to criticise it one way or the other, as all musics are given and enjoy equal voice. No need to promote it for that same reason.

And then I wake up, go to work, and spend my day standing next to a machine that makes loud noises.

The familiarity of the piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to recognize it.

and later

value judgements has become a fiction for the person who finds himself hemmed in by standardized musical goods

Isn't that fun? So, if I play you this song again and again and again and again to where you can actually tell it apart from the rest of the crap, you might confuse that with "liking" it? Isn't that the whole idea behind commercial radio? Value judgements as fiction in a world of standardized musical goods makes me think of Rolling Stone Magazine. I hear those guys who write about those records actually get paid. Is that true? I suppose having to do that day in and day out year after year probably takes its toll. How much would you have to get paid to write 500-2000 words about Justin Bieber or whoever? Holy crap does that ever sound like some dreary existentialist nonsense.

It also makes me think if I wanted to erode a people's judgement, I would hem them in with standardized musical goods. Once they realize the fiction of their judgment, and, by extension, their impotence in the face of it, in most cases the will to judge will be extinguished and capitulated to the people who own the means of production anyway. But that's crazy talk.

Speaking of crazy talk, how does the above relate to our beloved Crazy Experimental Freedom Music? Is it liked because it is recognized? Come on, be honest... Hands up, who doesn't love when they can recognize a Crazy Experimental Freedom artist when listening to a piece you've never heard before? Who doesn't feel like the time and the effort and alienation and under-employment was worth it when you say "is that Laurence Cook on drums?" and you're right?

Are "we" makers and consumers of CEF aka "This Music" hemmed in by our own standardized musical goods?

With the same justice, it can be asked whom music for entertainment still entertains. Rather, it seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all.

yeah...uh...yeah.

Anyone out there been entertained by music for entertainment recently? If it doesn't matter what was entertaining, then I think I can say I have been entertained quite recently. I was at party and Les Miserables on the plasma screen and who did I see but one of the The Jonas Brothers. It entertained me in the same way I'm entertained when I see a toddler accidentally hits their father in the genitals, doubling daddy over in agony (I'm laughing just typing that)...maybe not the intended, engineered "entertainment" but entertaining just the same.

That particular entertainment by music for entertainment lasted about 18 seconds and was entirely optional. Had I paid for tickets and had to watch the entire spectacle from beginning to end, it might not have been as entertaining.

Not less, but more Adorno to come!

Hipster Cull

2011-04-02T21:23:00.000-07:00

There are certain kinds of human activiy, such as a facility for lightening calculation, which are very unevenly distributed by nature: to all intents and purposes either you have them or you have not. But the gift of expressing oneself through music is not among these. As Johnny St Cyr said: 'You see, the average working man is very musical.' Naturally the gap between the best jazz musicians and the worst is immense, and there are very few of the best; but until it was turned into a self-conscious art-music which requires preliminary expertise, jazz was better suited than any other twentieth-century art to give artistic expression to the ordinary man, and especially (in the blues) the ordinary woman. Everyone has something to say, as the makers of films with non-professional actors discovered. Jazz, which grew up by completely adapting its technique to what ordinary people had to say, even to the point of allowing musical illiterates and those with a rather poor technique to make valid artistic creations required less preliminary selection among its musicians than any other art...

The jazz musician was therefore, and still is to a large extent, nearer to the ordinary randomly chosen citizen than most other potential artists than any other art in our century; in extreme cases, such as New Orleans, on virtually the whole of the population...The frontiers of jazz have been open towards the world of the non-musician. This has been one of the causes of its strength and vigour. If it becomes increasingly like the other orthodox arts it is likely that these frontiers will be closed, their passage being allowed only to selected entrants. If this happens, the character of jazz will change fundamentally, though one would not like to guess in what way

Eric Hobsbawm, The Jazz Scene 192-193

+ + +

How is everyone else digging "self conscious art music?"

Anyone out there trying to forget the I? Anyone feeling anti-art feelings in their crazy experimental freedom? Maybe anti-cultural is a better word...

Is "This Music"--"Crazy Experimental Freedom" as it were--a home for the "musically illiterate" and "those with a rather poor technique?" Can one regularly and diligently play music for 20 years and still be "musically illiterate?" How about of "a rather poor technique?"

Has our beloved improvised music become like the other orthodox arts with "passage allowed to selected entrants?" It's a pity Hobsbawm doesn't more clearly annunciate into what the "selected" are entering. The middle class? The Conan O'Brien band?

It's an odd balance--the ol' antagonism of performance art poseurs (musically illiterate, no facility on the instrument, no interest in getting any in the loosest conservatory sense of the word) and corporate boppers (masters degrees, hyper virtuosity, financially rewarded by the cultural machinery.)

Since Hobsbawm wrote this, it seems as if corporate boppers and performance art poseurs have united into a single entity in an effort to increase efficiencies in their gate keeping efforts--just as non-musician run and operated music recording, publishing and distribution companies tend to snowball into gigantic lumps of aesthetic uselessness in the name of increased revenue for a disproportionate few--and to great effect.

It could very well be that Zef has supplanted jazz as a music for the people. I recently learned of Die Antwoord via Unshimi Wam. Finding this (the video above) followed not long after. As super extra ordinary as Ninja and YoLandi are, they are ordinary people, making valid artistic creations of exceptional strength and vigor--check those Dark Side of the Moon shorts!

Is the same true for Jazz?

The White Hipster

2011-03-20T15:52:00.000-07:00

The white musician in America need not be discussed at such length. In a sense, he has practically from the start been the outsider type, playing a music which he knew to be misunderstood by the public. 'When will we be able to earn our living playing hot?' asked Frank Teschemacher, the famous Chicago clarinetist. The question was rhetorical. Teschemacher and his friends knew perfecly well from the moment that they began to imitate the black players that this kind of music was not saleable to the white dancing public for 'jazz' in the 1920s. The most they could hope to do with it was to play a few college dances where some of the students might be for it, to play the kind of night clubs or halls where the manager and the public didn't mind what the noise was, so long as it was loud, and to make an occasional record. If they wanted to earn their living by music, at least after 1927-8 or so, they had to play in 'sweet' or 'pop' bands. The uncompromising white musician thus faced the problem of the misunderstood and isolated artist from the beginning; indeed, who knows how many of them had not chosen to play jazz just because it was their private paradise, which neither fathers nor 'square' friends could share, a protest against the old generation, against the 150 per cent Americanism of the lush decade before 1929? Howard Becker the sociologist has described a group of such young white jazz musicians in the Chicago of the 'cool' era, but the description, with a few changes, could stand for the 1920's also: they were sons of good middle-class Americans. They protested, totally and absolutely, against all aspects of the 'American way of life', by playing their jazz, by frequenting only musicians and night-club girls, by wolfing existentialist or other guaranteed anti-bourgeois philosophers. No generation of white jazz players since the start (with the possible excpetion of the poor New Orleans whites who simply played the New Orleans way and thought no more about it) has been without such a contingent of rebels. And none has been without its quota of self-lacerating and doomed romantic artists, drinking themselves quietly into an early death, survived only by their records...

The classical white jazzman, a pocket Hemingway or Scott Fitazgerald, equally suspended between the whisky bottle, the wisecrack, and the jam session, was a refugee from the bourgeois world. However, there was also the non-classical white jazzman, whose situation was much more like that of the black musican. He was an entertainer or popular music player by trade, and not primarily a crusader or a deliberate castaway. This was certainly the position of most of the original white New Orleans players, the majority of whom came from social strata like the Sicilian immigrants, whose social position in the hierarchy of the old South was not a great deal higher than the blacks': at any rate they werealso sometimes lynched. 'Wingy' Manone, for instance, a slum child from New Orleans, and near neighbour of the young Armstrong, played music like Armstrong, worked the habitual circuits of the small-time Delta musicians--Louisiana, Texas, the middle-Mississippi valley, later Chicago, New York and the West Coast--and earned his living as a 'comedy personality' as much as by his trumpet.

Southern or Northern, the genuine professional musician type seems to have lacked something of the hunted purism of the refugee jazzman. George Bruines, for instance, an excellent New Orleans trombonist, seems to have been quite happy in his berth with the terrible band of Ted Lewis from 1923 to 1935, and did not feel his jazz status was jeopardised by lying down on his back with another musician on his stomach, while he operated a trombone slide with his feet...However, as we have seen, the economy of the jazz business is such that a great deal of casual work is inevitable, whatever the tastes or compulsions of musicians, and post-New Orleans white pros, especially those who got their start in the wild 1920s, when jobs were never short, have often had a varied and casual career...

Since the end of the thirties, the rise of the specialized jazz public has produced a new kind of white musician: the amateur jazz enthusiast, who has, in the nature of things, often turned into the professional player...

Whatever the character of the white jazz players, one thing has always--until recently at least--separated them from the black ones: their freedom of movement. The blacks could not leave. Playing music (for self-educated players, playing their kind of music) or some other form of entertainment were their only ways of earning a living unless they wanted to be unskilled labourers, and their only way of making a way in the world. For most of jazz history the black men, who found jazz jobs hard to get, had not the choice of joining a radio station's staff band or a classical orchestra, or working as a staff composer or arranger in films or on the air, or simply settling down to sell insurance or to journalism or business, like those middle-aged Chicagoan former jazz players who still meet annually, as "Sons of Bix", to commemorate the idol of their youth...The black musician was therefore obliged to stick to his music, which was his only prop. Perhaps this helps to account for his superiority in execution and in ideas over the white. For white musicians had ideas. The group of white New York Players who recorded in the later twenties, with or without the addition of brilliant Mid-Westerners like Bix Beiderbecke, shows signs of anticipating many of the musical ideas of 'modern jazz' fifteen years before the blacks, but it did not develop them. For what happened? "Miff" Mole, the trombonist went into commercial bands and radio, where he played mainly classical music for a decade. Eddie Lang, the guitarist went to Hollywood to make a film about Paul Whiteman and then became Bing Crosby's accompanist. Frank Trumbauer, the saxophonist eventually left music altogether for the Civil Aeronautics Administration. And so on. They were good jazzmen, but they did not have the hard compulsion to express themselves and to win their place in the world through developing their jazz, and only through it, which drove the Charlie Parkers, the Gillespies, and the Thelonious Monks. Only those who were congenitally and implacably 'anti-commercial' had this compulsion. But was it, in their case, always a compulsion to make music, or merely one to break away, to recapture their youthful paradise on Lake Michigan, to live the bohemian life of the anti-bourgeois? Perhaps both.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Jazz Scene, p.187-190

+ + +

The white musician in America need not be discussed at such length

HAHAHA!

'When will we be able to earn our living playing hot?'

When will we able to earn our living playing free?

The most they could hope to do with it was to play a few college dances where some of the students might be for it, to play the kind of night clubs or halls where the manager and the public didn't mind what the noise was, so long as it was loud, and to make an occasional record.

This is the 1920's he's talking about. Has it really been 90 years of this same nonsense?

It makes one wonder just how much "jazz" history (and particularly "white jazz history") has been made possible by the trust fund and the trustafarians empowered and emboldened by the capital from that trust?

And what has the wicked huge disparity between the life styles and exigencies of the trustafarians and the un-trusted barbarians (aka everyone else) done to "this music?" "Jazz" is such a huge pool, filled with so much liquid gold, it's hard to really tell how it's being affected in "real time." But "This Music"--our beloved Crazy Experimental Freedom music--what has the trust fund done to music (and the social conditions surrounding its creation)?

George Bruines...did not feel his jazz status was jeopardized by lying down on his back with another musician on his stomach, while he operated a trombone slide with his feet...

How many times have you left the house to check out a gig, only to come home and say "yeah, well once the Vaudeville routine was over, the music was ok..."

Drummers for some reason seem uniquely suited and perfectly willing to embrace the spirit of George Bruines. "Antics" as it were...adding another "dimension," another "facet" to the music by way of rib tickling, crowd pleasing shenanigans.

Just the other day I went to see a brass quintet perform at the local high school auditorium. They played for about 2 hours, all from memory. The concert began with Handel and Bach. From there it took a turn for the "lite", starting with a tango number, then moving on to a medley of familiar, co-opted operatic themes. Wagner's "Kill the Wabbit" for example. As the evening went on, more and more choreography and costumery was employed to (truly) titillate the audience.

Playing music (for self-educated players, playing their kind of music) or some other form of entertainment were their only ways of earning a living unless they wanted to be unskilled labourers, and their only way of making a way in the world.

And what's wrong with unskilled labour (aside from the pay)?

Sicilian immigrants, whose social position in the hierarchy of the old South was not a great deal higher than the blacks': at any rate they were also sometimes lynched.

I wonder, did any other European immigrant enjoyed lynchings in the US?

Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion!

The Black Hipster

2011-03-18T10:26:00.000-07:00

If we are to understand it, we must look at another characteristic phenomena of the Northern black generations, the 'hipster', whose evolution is intertwined with that of the modern jazzman. There is by now a good deal of literature about the hipster, most of which reads like a psychoanalyst's case diagnoses, and for a good reason: because the hipsters do not explain themselves, and show the world only their symptoms, which have to be interpreted. But the hipster is there all right. He began to appear at the central metropolitan street-corners of Northern ghetoes between the wars, though it is not impossible that he existed in embryo in Harlem even earlier. At any rate, he does not belong to the South...He talked jive-talk which nobody ought to understand. He lived 'for kicks'--jazz, sex, marihuana, or any other stimulants that were going. He was not like other people, the 'squares'. He was beyond the law, beyond human emotion, beyond ambition, and money, beyond good and evil; he was against the white and black status quo--the 'Uncle Toms'--but he did not know what he was for.

We are today fairly familiar with the hipster's type of negative, emotional, anarchic revolt: older generations have watched it among the young post-war generations in a number of countries, since the 'existentialists' of the post-liberation Left Bank in Paris gave it its first orthodox habitation and name. (Their American white equivalents, as Norman Mailer has correctly pointed out, have actually borrowed their idiom from the black hipster: 'In Greenwich village a menage-a-trois was completed--the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the [white] hipster was a fact in American life.') The international symbols of this revlot, like the late film star James Dean, are familiar to all. But in spite of this convergence, the original Harlem hipster was not, like the lost generation of Saint Germain des Pres, a derivation from orthodox upper-class culture, such as is still oddly reflected in the Edwardian toff's outfit of English working-class teddy-boys, or the pseudo-art-school styles of East End working-class girls, but a specialized development of the ghetto of labourers and outcasts.

The Harlem hipster 'functioned' in some respects like the jazz player. His social origins were certainly similar: he owed nothing to education or orthodox cultural influences. He was (Mezz Mezzrow is almost certainly right on this point) the would-be smart and able youngster with ambitions, 'keyed up with the effort to see and hear everything all at once, because that's how bottom-dogs ought to be unless they want to get lost in the shuffle.' His chief achievement, jive-talk--for talk was the hipster's only triumph--is a continuous, ever-renewed virtuoso collective improvisation which depends on talent, on speed, on imagination, and a sort of primitive verbal bravura. Nobody ought to be able to talk jive-talk, even if he learnt all yesterday's or even today's jive vocabulary by heart, just as nobody is able to play like Armstrong, or Charlie Parker even with the most painstaking imitation. For the hipster sophistication and lightening speed on the uptake were everything. His expression, as has been said, was 'the physiognomy of astuteness'. Whoever needed the faintest explanation of even the most cryptic gesture or statement was by definition a square. Like bop jazz, only in verbal terms, jive-talk was a set of variations on themes and rhythms unstated, became assumed...

Mezzrow is almost certainly right in believing that hipsterdom represented a more urgent, aggressive, and higher ambition than anything in the old South, quite apart from the passionate effort to show 'that they're not the ounce-brained, stuttering, tongue-tied Sambos of the blackface vaudeville routines, the Lazybones of the comic strips, the Old Moses of the Southern plantation'. In his way, the hipster aspired to the white man's status as a professional, an intellectual, in fact to just those achievements which are almost beyond the longest reach of the ghetto boy without money or skill, with a caricature of schooling, without a background or even a tradition that such ambitions are desirable. That is perhaps why the only people who have come close to realising the hipster's ambition in their own field are the jazz musicians. And that is probably why the ambitions of the ordinary hipster, who is far more often a man without career or achievement, turns from breaking out of inferiority into contracting out of it. At all events the hipster described in the post-1945 years is not the same man as the one whose 'fraternal order' Mezz Mezzrow joined around 1930. he is the collective 'outsider'. He does not live in this world,but escapes from it into a world of bop music, which the squares cannot understand, and pot (marihuana), of 'kicks'--sensations--which the square cannot feel. 'He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a hobo, a roustabout, or a free-lance moving man', it does not matter how, for the hipster (whose very essence in Mezzrow's description was action) no longer acts, but simply exists. Even his one triumph, jive-talk, seems to have contracted into a featureless, simplified vocabulary of monosyllables, grunts, and tacit gestures, which serves almost exclusively to differentiate him from the square. Only two things remain of his former self: a total refusal to conform to the squares and a savage integrity about his own standards and the things he likes...

If the old payers' ideal had been social, the new ones now modelled themselves on the Rimbauds and Modiglianis of orthodox art; or more exactly, the reproduced their ways independently. They doped heavily, to the disgust of the older men, for whom whiskey, women and an occasional stick of tea were all that a decent musician needed. There is little doubt--thought again it would be invidious to name names, even those which have come before police courts--that drug addiction was much more widespread among the modernists than among any previous group of jazz players. There are life-histories among them, such as that of the earliest and greatest of the moderns, and perhaps the only genius among them, Charlie 'Yardbird' Parker, which have the horrifying, helpless inevitability of the lone wolves of modern romantic culture. There was no more pleasure or success in the life of Parker than in that of Van Gogh, even though his talent was much more rapidly appreciated. There was merely the total inability to get on any terms with the world, and the compulsion to play what must be played in the face of the world. The artist has become the wild beast, who is by definition caged wherever he is, for every conceivable society must be a prison for him.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Jazz Scene, p. 183-186

+ + +

he was against the white and black status quo--the 'Uncle Toms'--but he did not know what he was for

Can't being against squares, Uncle Toms and the status quo be counted as being for something, even if that something doesn't have a name? And why does the burden of being "for" something fall on the hipster who is "against" squares, Toms and the status quo? He's busy being against! I wish Hobsbawm had detailed what exactly the squares, the Uncle Toms and the status quo were for and against. For themselves and against everyone else? Against everything that wasn't for them?

jive-talk--for talk was the hipster's only triumph--is a continuous, ever-renewed virtuoso collective improvisation which depends on talent, on speed, on imagination, and a sort of primitive verbal bravura. Nobody ought to be able to talk jive-talk, even if he learned all yesterday's or even today's jive vocabulary by heart, just as nobody is able to play like Armstrong, or Charlie Parker even with the most painstaking imitation.

Lets see, ever-renewed virtuoso collective improvisation depending on talent, speed and imagination and a sort of primitive verbal bravura...kind of sound like a description of the beloved music that you and I love, don't you think? The cherry on the sundae is of course the line just as nobody is able to play like Armstrong, or Charlie Parker even with the most painstaking imitation.

OK, so here we are again--yes or no: can people play like Louis Armstrong or Charlie Parker (or Miles Davis, or John Coltrane or Jimmy Lyons) even with the most painstaking imitation?

Mind you, Hobsbawm (though quite old) is quite functional. I wonder what Hobsbawm's makes of Jazz at Lincoln Center? If you had to guess, do you think Hobsbawm digs it, shouting "go cat go"?

Even his one triumph, jive-talk, seems to have contracted into a featureless, simplified vocabulary of monosyllables, grunts, and tacit gestures, which serves almost exclusively to differentiate him from the square.

EA I?

There was merely the total inability to get on any terms with the world, and the compulsion to play what must be played in the face of the world. The artist has become the wild beast, who is by definition caged wherever he is, for every conceivable society must be a prison for him.

While I'm sure I don't know what he's talking about here, it does makes me wonder if the artist who isn't a wild beast, who isn't caged wherever he is, for whom every conceivable society is not a prison is really an artist at all.

Stay tuned, White hipsters coming up next!

Pre Hipster Warmup

2011-03-17T10:46:00.000-07:00

However, it is important to remember that the new developments of jazz, however abstract and formal at first sight, expressed a political attitude. The very slogan 'art for art's sake' (or, as the pioneer revolutionary, John Birks Gillespie said, 'I play for musicians') must be translated, at least some of the time, into some such terms as: 'Jazz is an art-music, not just entertainment, and as Negroes we demand attention for it as such.'

The new intellectualism of jazzmen found expression in a variety of ways, some of them surprising. For instance, the fashionable costume of the new players was no longer simply a variant of the full-dress regalia of the labourers' king who is in the money, but a derivation from the dress of nineteenth-century Parisian bohemian intellectuals. Heavily rimmed glasses (even when not needed), a goatee, a beret, perhaps a long cigarette holder or meerschaum pipe were the uniform of the 'bopper' in the middle 1940's. Carelessness and sloppiness in dress--the true 'bop-follower' often systematically avoided pressing his suits--became fashionable. Reading and orthodox culture had never been essential qualifications for the jazz player, but in the new era it became a distinct asset to be able to say, like Thelonious Sphere Monk, a particularly characteristic pioneer of the new music, that 'we liked Ravel, Stravinsky, Debussy, Prokofieff, Schoenberg and maybe we were a little influenced by them'. This is the generation of players that started buying Dalis when in funds, and around which talk of psychoanalysis and existentialism flows.

The rebellion against the inferiority of the black and the traditional forms of jazz expression which were identified with it ('Uncle Tom Music') is equally evident in the behaviour of the new players. Among some--especially the latest, most intellectualised generation which has emerged sine 1950--it took the form of a deliberate turning away from the simple extrovert noises, the spontaneous emotions of the traditional musician, and the instruments that had always carried them. Trumpets were played as through they were flutes, drums were reduced to a whisper, wind instruments were sometimes eliminated entirely. Groups like the Modern Jazz Quartet, reacting against the old ways by anti-bohemianism, appear on the stage in faultless morning or evening dress, bowing stiffly and with expressionless faces to applause. Not to play like a music-hall act and a clown, not to behave even offstage like the old-style player who looks for a night club and some whiskey and a chick, and a band to sit in with, as soon as he comes off the job: such is their ambition...

The attitude of the new musicians, as well as their music, thus expressed the peculiar ambiguities of this generation of black intellectual rebellion. It was political, but expressed itself in abstraction and formalism. It was black, but expressed itself at least partly in the adoption of the patterns and clichés, the modes of orthodox (i.e. white) culture, a fact which made the task of the jazzman twice as difficult.

The new musician and the new music thus paradoxically undermined the racialism they intended to propagate. It is black, and desperately anxious to compete with the whites as black music: the 'respectable" ambition of the modern jazz musician is no longer simply to be accepted as a man who plays Bach, or as a composer of classical music, but as a man who plays a music which is as complex as Bach but based on a specifically black foundation, the blues. At the same time his rebellion--even when he attempts to side-step this effect by a flight into Mohammedanism or some other non-white culture--takes him farther away from the specifically black musical idiom of the old jazz, and from the cultural situation of the old jazzman which, though not particularly determined by skin colour, was sharply distinct from orthodox and respectable culture. His paradox is that through he wishes to be a much more conscious and complete challenger of white cultural supremacy than his predecessors, his very challenge assimilates him to the white pattern...The 'modern' jazzman represents the same type of minority avant-garde music as his white equivalents in Paris or New York. He differes from them only as, say, the non-representationalist differes from the expressionist painter. Hence the modern jazzman is rapidly evolving into a figure familiar to anyone who follows the history of twentieth-century Western arts. His 'blackness' (i.e. the special traditions of the culturally unorthodox world from which he has sprung) becomes increasingly irrelevant.

With one exception. The new type of avant-garde jazzman may evolve into another versions of the modern Western intellectual, but he had evolved out of the old self-made, outcast, entertainer. The startling fact about the 'modern' movement is that all its pioneers are or were jazzmen of the old plebeian type...No doubt some of them had a better education, including musical training, than the men of Armstrong's generation; but they can in no sense be regarded as people who owe anything substantial to conservatories or to the advantages of a black middle-class background, or even--since their music repelled most jazz intellectuals--to outside influences. It was among such players that the musical and social revolution of the jazz musician began round about 1941-2.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Jazz Scene, p.179-183

+ + +

You gotta love Eric Hobsbawm. Who knew that one of the world's greatest living historians is also a Jazz enthusiast? Well, in 1961, when the above was released, most likely no one knew Eric Hobsbawm was a Jazz enthusiast, as the above was written under Hobsbawm's pseudonym (think old fashioned "screen name") Francis Newton.

The above quote is really an introduction to a rough and tumble dialectic about "hipsters" starting on page 184 (which I'll post, uh, eventually).

In the meantime, some rhetorical questions for the three to five of you who regularly read my nonsense:

The new musician and the new music thus paradoxically undermined the racialism they intended to propagate.

Is that true? And if so, is this "good?"

What if I were to say that some (black) musicians have cast dispersions upon Bill Dixon for being "too white?" How would that make you feel? And what if I told you that for the most part, those black musicians who have accused Bill Dixon of being "too white" all had lighter coloured skin than Dixon?

How about this one:

His paradox is that through he wishes to be a much more conscious and complete challenger of white cultural supremacy than his predecessors, his very challenge assimilates him to the white pattern..

Wow. That's quite the pickle...like those Chinese finger traps--the more you pull apart, the tighter the trap gets. Of course, you have to believe in "white cultural supremacy"--and I suppose in 1961 it might have been a little easier to believe in such a thing. To get me to believe that now, I have to take "cultural" to refer less to the "use value" of the thing and more to the "exchange value"--Justin Bieber as the embodiment (white) "cultural" superiority. A riff on the age old if you're so smart, then how come you ain't rich.

And yet, would there be a (white) Justin Bieber if there wasn't a (black) Usher?

Lastly,

Hence the modern jazzman is rapidly evolving into a figure familiar to anyone who follows the history of twentieth-century Western arts. His 'blackness' (i.e. the special traditions of the culturally unorthodox world from which he has sprung) becomes increasingly irrelevant.

Is that true? I really really really am asking, and asking with no agenda or preconceptions. Y'all remember the Rande Sandke back and forth, right? Not having read the book, but having read all the comments, I get the feeling that Sandke indirectly touches on this notion--but again I haven't read the book, just the strong feelings it elicited in the comments section (and who doesn't like strong feelings in the comments section?)

Could it be that race is, in large part, in our modern day, the red cape of distraction used by the matadors of class?

Backwards, Backwards and Forwards

2011-01-19T23:11:00.000-08:00

Hands up, who else uses Linux?

Zero.

Well, if any of you did, you'd probably already know about SoX.

I'm determined to get my computer music schizzle happening, and I'm determined to make it happen using Linux.

Essentially, SoX is like Audacity, without any graphic user interface--just a bunch of code. Code like:

play rsclarinets.wav echo 0.9 0.88 160.0 0.4

It's kind of like making your own butter, or sewing ones own clothes...it really puts a new perspective on something normally taken for granted.

Here is the clarinet trio from WKCR--the one we know and love:

Lavalle Mateen Zappa Clarinets at WKCR track 4

Here it is backwards

Rclarinets
Here it is backwards and forwards.

Backwards Forwards Clarinets

Yup, it's come to that.

Stay tuned for more remixes of old tunes you probably weren't that interested in to begin with.

The Tenth of Many Instalments of Me

2011-01-05T17:11:00.000-08:00

The tenth, and for now, final instalment of the many instalments of me. Wow, what a wild ride. This web 2.0 thing really does add richly to the fabric and quality of our lives. 2011, great to see ya!

This little number was the version 0.9 of the Citizens' Orchestra kernel. It is a performance by Eric Zinman, Laurence Cook, Jane Wang, Nick Skrowaczewski, on the final piece of the evening Glynis Lowmon, and me.

Citizens Orchestra I - First Piece, Cambridge MA 2007

This is the first piece of the evening. The other three have been put together into a "thing" which I am given to understand is currently enjoying the neglect, apathy and disinterest of select music capitalists all over the world! And that's fine too because it was a gaye olde time that performance. Yes indeed, all the notes at least twice. Laurence Cook = national treasure. I didn't know Jane Wang's music before the performance, and as it turns out I should have as she played great. (You can also hear her on Sabir Mateen's recording Other Places Other Spaces.) Eric Zinman is a pan tonal champion and Nick Skrowaczewski, what can you say? As adept on the vibes as he is on the drums. Mr. Percussion!

And there you have it. Ten instalments of me, by me, ultimately for me and the 6 or seven of you who make a point of stopping by on a semi regular basis.

The next instalments of me could potentially be of even less interest, as they are pre-digital relics. The next instalments might also not appear for a long time as they are cassettes, and I'm not sure yet how to turn them into zeros and ones.

While the lions share of it makes even me cringe, there are some fun unheard cassettes from rehearsals no one heard for gigs that were never played.

Till then!

The Eighth (and Perhaps Ninth) of Many Instalments of Me

2010-12-29T12:29:00.000-08:00

Lavelle / Mateen / Zappa Clarinets at WKCR 2009, track 1

Lavalle Mateen Zappa Clarinets at WKCR track 4

Did everyone have a beautiful Christmas? Truly the most wonderful time of the year. Everyone getting ready to have a fun filled New Year's? Gonna watch Dick Clark's Balls drop with Ryan Seacrest? Rocking, balls dropping, Times Square...isn't winter grand?

Speaking of the city of piss, these little numbers were recorded therein, again at the wonderful and totally unpisslike WKCR.

All you need to know about this session can be found at Brilliant Corners (a Boston Jazz Blog) in this post about Matt Lavelle--who was one third of the enclosed clarinet trio.

When conceptualising this trio, I had hoped for 3 alto clarinets. That didn't happen and I was very pleased in the end with the various configurations of Bb soprano, Eb alto and Bb bass clarinet as played by Matt, the fantastic Sabir Mateen and your host, me.

I played a segment from this session at Soundlines, (sort of written about here.) The promises of follow-up future group hugs from that event have desiccated, sloughed off and gotten lost in the easy to clean synthetic low pile industrial carpeting with the sensible pattern, leaving only vague and empty memories of hope for a meaningful and equitable relationship between the academy and improvisers. While it was happening, the attached pieces of music did get the attention and kudos of one Ron Coulter, who himself gave a very compelling presentation at said event.

(Ron, these are for you!)

Unfortunately, meaningful documentation of the presentations (and the presenters) has vanished from the ICASP website; yet another virtual disappointment in a long line of cyber sadnesses emanating from our beloved interwebs with regards to the documentation of that red-headed stepchild of a music, Crazy Experimental Freedom.

Regardless, the session was a joyous one. Time spent at WKCR playing Crazy Experimental Freedom Music with musicians of such high calibre is time well spent. Enjoy.

More thinly veiled swipes and semi exasperated expressions disappointment coming your way in the next instalment of the many instalment of me!

Hells Jeah End of Year List

2010-12-22T00:22:00.000-08:00

Let's be honest; #1 on the 2010 end of year list? Watching you-tube!

A few things came my way this year. Our friend Max sent this delicious gem.

That's right, all of Billy Joel's greatest hits played all at once. And indeed, this is without any question the greatest, greatest-hit of Mr. Joel's career.

Visit wondertonic.tumblr.com and say thank you.

Bill Joel not your speed? How about Huey Lewis?

No? Abba maybe?

I'd sit through Mamma Mia if that was waiting as the grand finale. Wouldn't you?

Speaking of sitting, hopefully you're sitting down when you listen to Lin Yu Chun's performance of Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You.

I know I know, what feeling to feel first?

Speaking of Chinese renditions, I got a soprano saxophone in 2010. An Antigua Winds--you know Embrace the cold, play with fire.

Antigua Winds...who thought that up? (Embrace the cold, play with fire...who thought that up? Like, what the fuck can that possibly mean?) Was it someone born and raised in North America? If so, what demographic were they aiming for? File that one under "do words mean anything."

It's a fine horn. It came with a Yamaha 4c mouthpiece. Don't call it Mr. Right, call it Mr. Right Now. Evan Parker suggested I try the Selmer Super Session--because really, who doesn't love lots of words in a row all beginning with the same letter?

Mr. Parker told me that at the 2010 Vancouver Jazz festival, where I saw him play with the Alexander Von Schlippenbach trio. That was quite a thing...Paul Lovens is reverberating particularly clearly in my memory, but everyone played great. A fantastic evening of music. Thank you 2010.

Significant, but in a horrible way, 2010 was the year we lost Bill Dixon.

We also lost Gregory Issacs

Two very different and very beloved musicians. NO thank you 2010.

2010 will also be remembered as the year I organized my cassette collection. Anyone out there still rocking cassettes? Anyone out there know an easy, "supported" hardware/software combo for digitizing cassettes using Linux?

No? I didn't think so--but we're not going to let that stop us from loving two cassette rediscoveries.

The first features goats

The second features dogs.

If memory serves correct, 2010 was also the year Stop Requested and Black Cracker made their debut on the New Texture pan-media super corporation. But you knew that, and probably already have copies of both, right? I mean, Jesus H. Christ, it was on Dangerous Minds!

2010 is also the year that my electronica recording 88888888 was released. You can buy it on CDBaby. You can also purchase it as a download at this juncture, if that's your thing. If it isn't, the actual "product" is a hand made edition of 33, about five of which have been foisted upon friends and disinterested music industry types. There must be a pony somewhere, right?

2011...more digital days. January 1, 10, 11 as well as October and November 1, 10 and 11. November 11, 2011 should be a fun one. Or it should be the same old nonsense. Who can say? What does it matter? 12-21-2012 is just around the corner!

The Seventh of Many Instalments of Me

2010-12-21T00:21:00.000-08:00

Certainly you all remember (and cherish) your time listening to The Sixth of Many Instalments of Me. In that post, I promised you the duo 2 years later.

And here it is. The Skrowaczewski Zappa duo, 2008.

Skrowaczewski / Zappa at Zappanale #19, Rehearsal 2008

Zappanale was many things, none the least of which being an opportunity to make more music with the wonderful Nick Skrowaczewski.

This track was recorded in the basement of the Zappanale headquarters right there in beautiful Bad Doberan Germany. It was recorded using Nick's Edirol hand held recording device.

The basement as I recall was your typical basement rehearsal room, complete with numerous posters and empty bottles of soda strewn everywhere. (Zappanale was a very soda-forward festival. Nick and I got 12 2 litre bottles of soda upon arrival. A mix-n-match pack if you will. My favorite flavor was the no flavor flavor. It had quite the sturdy bubble without any color or taste.) Maybe there was also a small childrens bicycle and a dryer in the rehearsal space? Anyhow, a real comfortable back-at-home-in-11th-grade kind of feeling.

No one was present for this recording (it was a rehearsal) and in retrospect, this might be some of the strongest work from that wee blip of productive time there in Germany. Which makes me think about the history of music, particularly how most of it is only known to the musicians making it. Rehearsal are often much hipper than the actual performance. How many rehearsal have you been to?

Yeah.

And with that, we wait with bated breath for the Eighth Instalment of Many Instalments of Me.

The Sixth of Many Installments Of Me

2010-12-15T08:42:00.000-08:00

Skrowaczewski / Zappa live at WKCR 2007 by Stanley Jason Zappa

Interstellar Space...Papyrus...The Nick Skrowaczewski Stanley Jason Zappa duo? Stakes are pretty high with the duo. It's an instrumentation that lends itself well to embarrassment and humiliation. Unlike in the large(r) ensemble, there's no hiding in a duo.

On the flip side, the duo is a great way to share some feelings in no uncertain terms--perhaps even more so than the solo.

This track was recorded live at WKCR by Ben Young in 2007. The three or four of you who read this blog are no strangers to the joy and awesomeness that is WKCR and it's helmsman Herr Young. Live to 3 track? Maybe 1/4" reel to reel tape was involved? How soon we forget. What was I saying again?

Music making with Nick Skrowaczewski (drums on this one) is always a pleasurable, continually morphing reality. Next week (in the seventh of many installments of me) I'll post another duet from 2009. Will you hear a difference?

Stay tuned to answer that question for yourself!

The Fifth of Many Installments of Me

2010-12-08T08:42:00.000-08:00

Hall Skrowaczewski Zappa Trio track one, 2005 by Stanley Jason Zappa

The Hall Skrowaczewski Zappa Trio...kind of rolls of the tongue like Medeski Martin and Wood. Like MMW, the HSZ trio trafficked in rollicking good fun.

Evidence again more Studer trickery. And why not? If it kind of worked once, keep using it again and again until it is tired and old and an nuisance. Culture does the same thing all the time--why shouldn't I?

On this track, Nick Skrowaczewski plays both vibes and drums (though not at the same time.) I'm guessing that the vibes were overdubed over the existing trio. There might be two vibes going at once come to think of it.

As far as I'm aware (and for the 6 to 7 of you who visit this site, please fill in my blanks) Multi-tracking hasn't really enjoyed quite the same centrality in "this music" as it has in rock.

I know Dixon used it to great effect on Octette #1 from Vade Mecum II and...that's all I can think of! Who else? Help me here!

The Fourth of Many Installments of Me

2010-12-01T08:42:00.000-08:00

Here's a real thigh slapper!

Jon Van Wie There (2004) by Stanley Jason Zappa

This fun little number was the "midcourse" for that Kings Of Dispassion (or was it Friends Family Disease Death) record that never came out.

It is (duh) dedicated to the late great Jon Van Wie, who not only taught me (and countless others) how to play the guitar, but who also made me two mouthpieces--one for the tenor and one for the baritone.

I still play the one for the tenor--a modified Hite, that one. The other I dropped on a cement floor, shattering it, along with my psyche.

Getting back to Jon, it's fair to say that no amount of words will ever really do justice to his genius, the gifts of "knowledge and overstanding" he freely gave, or the huge crater of sadness and loss left in the wake of his passing.

It's probably also fair that the above little number doesn't do justice to any of that either.

It was, however, another occasion to have fun with a gigantic Studer tapedeck.

I do remember playing this for Bill Dixon. His reaction: "the out of tune piano thing isn't working."

Agree? Disagree?

The Third of Many Installments of Me

2010-11-24T08:42:00.000-08:00

Track six from Friends Family Disease Death by Sistemazione

Towards the end of my Portland reality, I played pretty regularly with Jacob Hall, Matthew Freid and Jeffery Helwig. We had a nifty little combo called Sistemazione.

We had a semi regular thing at a happy and fun little club in Portland Oregon called The Dunes on the inviting and friendly MLK drive. Combine that with zero publicity (not bragging or complaining) and a Monday night and you get a regular, dedicated, guaranteed audience of usually between zero and one.

I liked that aspect of it...the dystopic setting combined with Portland's well disguised yet undeniable apathy toward and disinterest in a realisation of This Music without the central presence of clogs or vaudeville. I really could do what ever I wanted on that saxophone because absolutely no one cared. It was very liberating. I felt comfortable there. Maybe abuse is addictive, but in a way it was ideal.

This track was from the "record" which was stillborn, but still fun to make just the same. It was recorded at Audible Alchemy where Built to Spill eventually took up a multi year residence of extreme thoroughness. It's my favorite building on Mississippi Avenue there in hip, happening North Portland. Full of memories too--like the time I brought a toilet plunger there at 1am during a Wolf Parade recording session. Issac Brock thanked me personally: "That's what I call doing someone a nice" is what he said. When you need a plunger, you need a plunger I guess. The plumbing was brand new. Must have been quite the recording session.

More music to come from the Neve console and Studer deck at Audible Alchemy soon. Stay tuned for the next edition of Many Installments of Me!

The Second of Many Installments Of Me

2010-11-17T08:42:00.000-08:00

All Of Them Are Mine by Stanley Jason Zappa

Of the many, many lingering regrets from my time at Bennington College, one of the big ones is not taking advantage of the computer music offerings.

Joel Chadabe headed up the department. I remember for some reason, in some class, he came and gave a lecture. Maybe he just gave a lecture...I can't remember. I do remember within moments of him opening his mouth having one of those d'oh! moments of bad, wherein I realised I should have been studying with him (as well) all along.

This one was made with a $1.00 (one dollar) MIDI keyboard, plugged into the computer via a high-latency cable, which may have come with the keyboard. At the time of this track's creation, my computer had a Yahama XG midi card.

The way this one was most likely made was by turning the recording tempo up as high as it could go. 999bpm maybe? Then, I pressed all the keys and all the buttons as fast and as frantically as I could. From there, it was slowed down to 20bpm. Thanks to the magic of MIDI, all the pitches stay the same. Love that! I made it, but I didn't make it. Love that even more!

While I don't really seek it out all that aggressively, I've had my joys with electronica and computer music. Conlan Nancarrow has to be thought of as a predecessor and antecedent to the world of MIDI, no? Gotta love Jazz From Hell and Civilization Phase III. There's nothing wrong with Kraftwerk, nor is there anything wrong with Matt Weston, nor is there anything wrong with Stalaktos.

I wish they'd hook some of these super computers up to a MIDI keyboard. Can you imagine the sound(s) one of those things could make turned up to eleven?

The First of Many Installments of Me

2010-11-10T08:42:00.000-08:00

Good news and bad news.

Good news: less me using hurt words

Bad News: more me making hurt sounds--you know, CEF or Shwe owei cwded leehdas or the Hated Music or the Beloved Music or my new favorite "Crazy people music" or what ever it is you want to call it.

Soap and Water Country Boy by the Leonard Skrowaczewski Zappa trio featuring Wyatt Doyle.

Soap and Water Country Boy features the sadly defunct and sorely missed Leonard Skrowaczewski Zappa trio with the addition of Wyatt Doyle on vocals. The track was recorded at KEXP in Seattle for a show called Sonarchy hosted by Doug Haire.

The recording was a lot of fun. Doug Haire was a joy to work with. A fast set up and a great sound within minutes. No excruciating microphone gymnastics or endless knob twiddlery.

Much of Wyatt's content is only meaningful to a handfull of people--lines like "That was the Little Man...the Little Man" resonate more fully with some than with others. The rest of are accessible to all: "Well, not the Jesus Christ, but a Jesus Christ."

The show was supposed to be for live broadcast. It was not. It was eventually broadcast, but according to those listening, as soon as the words started, the live transmission ended. HA! I think they went to a baseball game maybe?

More material from this session can be found here.

Stay tuned for more me!

Happy Halloween! I'm Number One!

2010-10-31T20:54:00.000-07:00

It was Drowning Witch or Goblin Girl. I wanted something with a sola, so Drowning Witch it is.

Don't get me wrong, I love me some Chad Wackerman as much as the next guy, but it is an enduring sorrow that FZ never played with anyone like Laurence Cook or Paul Lovens or Sunny Murray, or someone who could really go out. I can listen to that era of FZ's soloing for hours and hours and hours and still feel like, I dunno...like there was still more yet to be said/played/done. (Oddly, I don't feel that way the electronic music or the symphonic material.)

But really, this is no time for sorrow, because I'm number one! That's right, I'm the Number One Jazz Artist in the Reverb Nation of Kelowna! Or in Kelowna, I'm Reverb Nation's Number One Jazz Artist. EITHER WAY I'M NUMBER ONE!

That is thanks to FANS LIKE YOU! As you are well aware, Kelowna's place in Jazz history is unimpeachable--vibrant, rich and storied. Like me, just about synonymous with Jazz. Stanley Jason Zappa = Kelowna = Jazz. The music is a reflection of the place is the reflection of music is a reflection of me and I'M NUMBER ONE IN JAZZ OF IT ALL ACCORDING TO REVERBNATION!

So what's next you ask? Calgary? Who can say, but with me being NUMBER ONE JAZZ ARTIST IN KELOWNA, I'd say the whole damn world is probably mine for the picking. THANKS TO FANS LIKE YOU!

DREAD!!!

2010-10-25T15:06:00.000-07:00

More sadness. Gregory Issacs has passed and will be missed.

Happy Birthday Bill Dixon!

2010-10-05T10:05:00.000-07:00

Mourning is over. Time to put on some big boy trousers and meet the world.

Lights are back on at the Dixon Society. Enjoy.

Since the 16th of June, I haven't been listening to much music. That's not entirely true. I've been listening to a fair bit of Peter Tosh during my commute as that CD is stuck in the player. Aside from that, not much music. Not much of this music, anyway.

While there was a conscious decision to cease and desist with the writing until today, I wasn't motivated to do much writing anyway. Do words mean anything? If blogging isn't the essence of saying things to make yourself feel better (which is a bad idea), then what is it?

Before responding to Dixon's passing, I wanted to wait and see what I missed most about Bill Dixon. Now that I've waited, it is clear that what I miss most about Bill Dixon was his zero tolerance for time wasting morons and the nonsense they generate. Actually, zero tolerance might not be the best descriptor, as in many instances there was an active and hostile aggression towards said time wasting morons and their nonsense. Less than zero tolerance.

There was a bit of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman to Dixon, in as much as he wasn't going to let just any clown denigrate the sanctity of his beloved music. Dixon believed in what he did. It meant something to him. This Music, which he in part created, was his life.

This was a refreshing change from the ultra positivist free to be you and me ethos at Bennington College where in exchange for the highest tuition in the know universe, every turd on the living room carpet, no matter how meagre, was given a "that's great." With Dixon, as with Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, you fucked up, you heard about it. The pay off was that "tonality" and its minions were no longer this big bad thing to which one needed to fear or conform. Jammin on a C7b9 chord at the restaurant? Good on ya. Dixon instilled a confidence and "sound-view" that made insipid melodies, heads, bridges, licks, beats and the rest of the low-hanging musical twaddle that continues to pock this music an option.

I'll also miss Dixon's vast breath of experience with both this music as an aesthetic and the troubled relationship between this music and the mechanisms exploitation as applied to it. Dixon was, of course, "there" decades before there was a this music, and Dixon was (to a greater or lesser extent) involved in the business of music for at least half of his 84 years. No matter how thick the smoke, no matter how many mirrors, Dixon saw through it all.

Let's not forget that Dixon was also black for his entire life--since 1925. This fact is something he kept front and center as long as I knew him. Losing any black person who lived in the United States since 1925, who was of sound mind and eloquent of speech is a huge loss. Dixon was 20 in 1945 and deeply concerned with "Jazz" when "Jazz" was being created as a new and vibrant Art. Perhaps this is why Dixon had such a low opinion of the recreated and lavishly awarded simulacrum of today--he could tell from experience that most of it was, at best, a way to sell the back catalogue of dead people--many of whom Dixon knew personally.

The perspective of those who have seen the con from the beginning--this is the perspective "we" should weigh heavily as "we" prepare to (continue to?) step down from our place of world economic primacy, cultural centrality and social relevancy. Unless, of course "we" are of that caste and class that steps down from nothing. I imagine that those who steer the good ship Culture, those for whom "what ever appears is good, all that is good will appear" will continue to enjoy the view from the captains deck right until the very last moment, long after the crew have drowned and the engines have stopped.

Dixon-as-Punk-Rocker will be missed as well. If "punk ain't no religious cult" and if "punk means thinking for yourself", then Dixon was the Lord God King Punk Rocker of all time. The original, the first, the last. A Punk Rocker who read the New York Review of books for decades. Dixon was Crass before there was a Crass. Witness L'Opera and Odyssey--two D.I.Y. masterpieces. Witness the Jazz Composers Guild, The October Revolution, The Black Music Division...all actions meant to drive a wooden spike in the heart of bland bourgeoise retardica.

While others fought each other for a good place on the exploitation line to insure they'd get first dibs on the yoke du jour, Dixon worked hard to dismantle that paradigm. For this (while he was alive) he was maligned and resented. The parent culture still can't manage to put Dixon on the cover of any magazine.

I miss Dixon's unabashed hate of all things "pop."

I miss Dixon's honesty.

I miss Dixon's sense of humor.

I miss Bill Dixon.

A Very Sad Day

2010-06-16T07:42:00.000-07:00

A very sad day indeed.

Attention Attention--Please Don't Panic

2010-03-20T10:40:00.000-07:00

I'm doing a little virtual house keeping here...posts from the past are coming to the fore...not quite sure why, not quite sure I care why...more ignorable hurtwords forth coming, please stand by...Hopefully y'all are having a fun spring...

Recent Works on Paper

2010-03-14T23:54:00.000-07:00

Here are some of my recent 'works on paper' flashed before your very eyes via the magik of flickr. Please enjoy this moment of me being quiet.

The Citizen's Orchestra For Bill Dixon I-III

2010-03-07T17:19:00.000-08:00

For Bill Dixon I

For Bill Dixon II

For Bill Dixon III

First of all, a thank you to forbesgraham for getting these sound clouds together.

The Citizen's Orchestra has been given dialectic here, at Stephen Haynes' blog and elsewhere.

Now you can hear it for yourself!

Pass it along! Feel free to share and share freely!

Twaddlegate! Craggyman Strikes Again (You Want Henry James)

2010-02-16T11:43:00.000-08:00

"There is always a form"

--Bill Dixon

+ + +

"What a horrid world it would be if everyone wrote like Henry James."

--Chris Rich in response to Dean

+ + +

Bustle rift in some adrift supermarket. Craggy man buckled wheelchair whirring bulgelevel no fool fooling them not for a purpleheaded throbber reason more to flap.

One in five with sores he sees there where the world comes from heated A bombs diving from cunts to tax the starvers cancersacking. Past stalky ridiculousness of human form front back laughing tween tears when tears x rayically acid rain twist clockhands joyful showing joy backass fro breaking every bone in bodies cellophaned boneless breast make freezerfit full.

Whirlychair craggyman lowdowning clefts and scoops, looking yon to looking again to cartoon morbid stalkies, scribble skin short hair to bristle em redfaced at cadabrawed liney public head post defecate smell urched ooue ooue pokerfaced you know damn well...inks the no direction of lookerson to turn at sunny park down coitus...fodder for deathy bedroom angst speels whatall mankind spurts.

Craggy man strikes again.

Z notions of entireness only direction of his harpy wheels yettho going to gone parkinglot celebrity status, get out of my face, blush at your own boner, go home get lost leastways.

Dread holy technicolor confession looking for yourself sunday funnypages, strikes again.

Unmerited jeans drabbering him non, rud sun marking somewhere, Z looping crowd folks burping tacks, vogue.

Riverside mental patients wane eloquent poesy epic cops knocking portacan doors down gonna get you what do you think you think you can light up and think differently in any way than the rest of us where are your genitals fucker, though these questions they are not asked out loud like dogma.

Z sees all of this that reaches his ears.

Spandex allwheres, brains meltdown to shit fester souls stoop to pool floating under skies only crotch ass chest full spandexed so that crotch ass chest are not crotch ass chest or suggestive or crotch ass chest or belonging to anything or anyone but crotch ass chest are spandexed shouting crotch ass chest ergo we am.

Ground strewn identification of otherwisers, tossed identification otherwise penalty.

Identification photo only crotch ass chest decoupage scrambled tooth and nail.

Shame uninvented, figleafless.

You want Henry James.

John Crouse, Lapse One from the book Lapses

+ + +

"But can they play jazz?" Remember that one? Maybe you are too young to remember that--but somehow I think that, uh, qualifier is still alive and well. When I was a wee-tot, "Free Jazz" or "Improvised music" (or "Skronk" as some call it) somehow didn't ever quite count as music if it was played by people who couldn't play Jazz--no matter how it sounded. It was always a 3/5th music if you will.

Yet if you could play an excruciatingly meticulously diatonic solo without one trace of dissonance over Autumn Leaves, somehow your "free jazz" or "improvised music" (or "Skronk") was somehow more legitimate, more real--no matter how it sounded.

Matt Lavelle didn't come under fire so much for his form, but for his alleged "subliteracy." If words still meant anything (and the don't) we could debate M. Lavelle's literacy--perhaps setting up a chart or a graph with a system to tabulate grammatical infractions and from there determine a co-efficient against which we could plot a curve whereby we ultimately (and numerically) answer the question once and for all if Matt Lavelle is "literate."

In the meantime, Matt has written a great deal--literate or not--and regardless of his "literacy" or his heretical use of our beloved punctuation (and more to the point, his occasional playing of a b5 when a 5 would have been the more harmonically, if not morally appropriate choice) I, along with many many others, have read Matt's writing and have thought deeply about some of the ideas he has presented. So in a way, he's already won. So much for the importance (let alone centrality) lexicographic propriety.

(You want Henry James)

+ + +

In a further kismetic synchronism, I happend upon Bassist Reuben Radding opining about "form":

I feel these days that a lot of the community I'm a part of in NY are less than psyched about free-improv groups, and are more interested in projects with some amount of composition, and I think I understand why (lack of a feeling of evolution, perhaps?)

The lack of a feeling of evolution? What about the fact of evolution? (Do words mean anything?)

While I can't vouch for Reuben and his (the?) "community's" feelings about evolution, I would certainly hate to have to argue that "free-improv" has not evolved.

Is music evolving towards or away from a written set of instructions? Is the end game in musical evolution the ability to read notes from a piece of paper or is the end game in musical evolution the ability to make music with out any props, signs, rules or instruction?

Is evolution the sole dominion of clever score writers? Is it the sole dominion of the monitizers?

Hey, here's an idea, how about a Top Ten List of the most evolved "not-free improv" improvisers, what they've evolved from and what they have evolved into.

Then (afterwards, of course) what say "we" make a separate (but equal) Top Ten list of the most un-evolved "free improv" improvisers, what they haven't evolved from and what they haven't evolved into.

Any takers?

(You want Henry James)

+ + +

Richie Aprile taught us the only time you back pedal is when you are going to drive over Beansie again--crackling any previously uncracked bones. As if the ultimately, comparatively vanilla Herr Kelsey did anything of the kind. "Formally conventional" as hurt word. That Chris Kelsey sure knows how to hit where it hurts--a real social liability that one...

Meanwhile David R. Adler makes this smear

And that’s what I suspect Chris means. For “formally conventional,” read “not free jazz,” not explicitly tied to the post-Ayler school of skronk.’

which is far more offensive on far more levels than anything I've read by Chris Kelsey--and yet no one is giving David R. Adler the gears. Is that because no one noticed or is it because no one cares? Either way, vhat a vacky voild!

(You Want Henry James)

+ + +

The future:

Total punctuation excellence. Every world spelled correctly. Nothing left to chance, not even chance, which is carefully scripted and administered within a carefully ordered, pre-determined parameters precisely gauged to successfully partner with work schedules and accepted societal and behavioural norms. Sponsorships and larger cultural/corporate support awarded to those able to vaguely disguise-yet-uphold the musical code of ethics most clearly annunciated by Laurence Welk. Total market/social exclusion for those who show the slightest signs of criticality or penchant for straying from said Welkian mores.

"I want to hear Caravan with a drum sola"

YOU WANT HENRY JAMES!

Luca Turin, Matt Weston, Perfume, Seasick Blackout

2010-01-09T23:17:00.000-08:00

Luca Turin. Perfumes. That's right--Perfumes The Guide by Luca Turin. Luca Turin...greatest critic/writer since Mencken? The greatest critic/writer criticizing and writing today? Lord God King Luca Turin?

Here:

Dune (Dior) ***** fresh oriental

Forget suburban-gothic names, forget all the phony "noirs," from Angelique to Orris. True, menacing darkness is not to be found in upset-the-parents Alice Cooper poses, but in this disenchanted, ladylike gem. Loosely inspired by the excellent Venise five years earlier (Yves Rocher, 1986), Dune is a strong contender for Bleakest Beauty in all of perfumery. It is clearly headed from the very start towards that peculiarly inedible cheap-chocolate drydown that made Must, Allure (q.v. for a fuller account of the effect), and a thousand others, though Dune's is the best of the lot, dissonant but interesting. But the way it gets there is extraordinary, with a beguiling transparency, even freshness, particularly in the anisic carrot-seed top notes. It is hard to pin down what makes Dune so unsmiling from top to bottom: it's as if every perfumery accord had become a Ligeti cluster chord, drained of life, flesh-toned in the creepy way of artificial limbs, not real ones. Marvelous.

Laguna Homme (Salvador Dali) * trashoid oriental

If you drive a Moscow taxi at night, this one's for you

Remix for Her (Armani) * fruity floral

A trite, canned-fruit-salad confection of no interest except to illustrate the cynicism and idiocy of its makers.

...and so on and so on for a few hundred pages. Tania Sanches is no dummy, and no question she can write and write well, but after a while, once your totally drunk on Turin's totally electrifying virtuosity with the written word, she just gets in the way.

You have to admire how quickly Turin can drop the science. You also have to admire Turin's fearless critical directness backed by total erudition and cultural literacy, not to mention an encyclopedic knowledge of and totally cutting edge position as practitioner within the subject.

Something to which we can all aspire, no?

+ + +

Seasick Blackout (Matt Weston, 7272 music) ***** electronic future-memories

Hey, how did Matt Weston get the sounds in my head on to that CD? Seasick...blackout--been there, done that, and now I know what it sounds like: scary, ubercontrolled in an out-of-controlled way, dark and loud. A contemporary tone poem about Man cowering and pissing himself in the face of an/our/the ever increasing mechanized brutalization of society and the brutal mechanization of culture--and mechanized brutality's reaction. The experience of listening on the way to work (catering a wake) in a snow storm, driving a traction-free Ford truck that not only wants to bankrupt me but kill me too, Seasick Blackout was so totally appropriate it was as if the CD wasn't even on. Once it was over, in the silent din of my own thoughts amid winter driving conditions, I realized that should I ever find myself high on LSD, Seasick Blackout will either be the last thing I'll listen to or the only thing I'll listen to. One of those kinds of records.

+ + +

The Turin dimension: "remain(s) but fleeting illusions, to be pursued but never attained" To quote his holiness Haile Selassie I.

And yet there are a lot of CD's which deserve all the virtual attention they can get, and by gum, now that I got my scanner working, I'm going to scan the covers and write a paragraph about all of them. I can use the practice writing (and thinking and listening) and the two or three of you who regularly check in can just as easily not check in, since this is just the internet anyway and words mean less now than ever before.

OMFG END OF YEAR LIST END OF YEAR LIST

2009-12-25T21:58:00.000-08:00

Top ten list top ten list look at me look at me top ten list for 2009

1 -- Recordings I have acquired

a. John Blum: Who Begat Eye and In the Shade of the Sun

A new John Blum solo record and a John Blum trio record with William Parker and Sunny Murray. Can you possibly dig it? Everyone should know who John Blum is. You know who John Blum is, right? You must have heard Astrogeny with William Parker, Dennis Charles and Antonio Grippi by now, and you should have heard Naked Mirror by now also--what with it being an aesthetic predecessor of Who Begat Eye. You might have heard John Blum live in NYC, but then again, you might not have, as there are only so many pianos in New York City and the parent culture likes to celebrate the same people again and again and again.

While the parent culture thing is nothing new, the piano thing is pretty pathetic for two reasons. The first pathetic reason is historic:

Heinrich Englehard Steinweg from Seesen, Germany, installed his piano business, now anglicized to Steinway & Sons, on the Lower East Side by 1853, before moving to a factory on Fourth Avenue and eventually to Queens

And I don't think Steinweg and Sons was the only piano manufacturer in that immediate area at that time. In fact I know they weren't--because wikipedia told me so. The Loisidia used to riddled with pianos. Now it's riddled with high rents. Great.
The other is economic: there still is a lot of wealth in Manhattan--enough wealth that if the money people were (or wanted to be) meaningfully engaged with the art people, there would, by now, be a grand piano on every corner of that island and music, rather than the smell of aluminum and professional excellence, wafting through the air.

b. Kevin Frenette:
When Kevin gave me Connections I couldn't hear out of my right ear due to filthy germs of Cambridge, Manhattan and New Jersey. Worse, the right speaker is the onely one that works in the truck--that useless piece of shit money-black-hole of a Ford truck--and for the most part, that's where most the listening happens. Listening to the CD on a real live working stereo is worth the effort, as the music is quite excellent. There is a prevailing feeling of motility through the CD. Tatsuya Nakatani and Todd Keating together make a mighty sonic loadstone. Andy McWain drizzles in just the right amount of tonality amidst dexterous, compelling playing. Kevin Frenette is a good reason why smashing every guitar on earth might be a bit of an overreaction to a few bad apples. Lastly, it sounds to me like Kevin has put together a group, and not an all star session--not that they aren't all stars, but there's a cohesion and confidence that comes from...a very hard to see spaceship hovering over earth? Who can say anymore.

c. Eric Zinman Trio
Three cheers for Eric Zinman. If I'm not mistaken this is his third piano-bass-and-drums trio album thus far. This is the first not to use Laurence Cook, which is a pity, as any occasion to hear Laurence Cook is a unique joy. Benjamin Duboc on Bass and Didier Lasserre on drums are, however, an outstanding clutch and transmission perfectly suited for Zinman's piano gearing

d. Sabir Mateen quintet Secrets of When
Raphe Malik is on this one. For some reason I feel like it was one of if not his last recording. Sabir plays alto, tenor, clarinet and flute and plays them all equally well--however the sound of Sabir on alto and Raphe on trumpet is timeless and eternally enduring. During her late-romantic and high 'dissonant' moments, Naoko Ono reminds me of a lighter, softer John Blum--which is not judgement in a better-and-worse kind of way--just a density/dynamic assessment. Nakono Ono sounds great, and is used to great effect in the group. Same for Jane Wang and Ravish Momin. Way above average concept and realization all the way around.

2. 1/6th of a cow
(ground, stew, porterhouse, sirlion tip, eye of round roast, t-bone)
A nice holiday treat from the feed lot. It's been about 2 months now of almost constant beef eating and I'm not even close to a quarter of the way through. The cow is a mighty thing, and it would appear that much of it's might comes from cutting its head off and portioning out it's body in small packages. This is not something to be taken lightly, or for granted. It is something that can happen without a huge amount of space and not a lot of capital investment. It's also something that's going to have to start happening all over the place if "we" are to take this local food/100 mile diet thing seriously. Or maybe it too is something we talk about to make ourselves feel better about the wickedness and irrationality of our lives. What's more, all the 'waste' from the process (blood, intestines, spines) can be made into soil fertility, as opposed to, say, the waste from the oil industry, which isn't as good for soil health.

3. Burning CD's with Linux
First this then this. Linux is quite a thing...humbling, humiliating...many feelings. Any of you out there give a shit about Linux? Is there any parallel between music and Linux--particularly the gnu license/open source philosophy? Can "we" as artists learn anything from the gnu license/open source philosophy?

4. Chris D book on New Texture
Hooray for New Texture and Hooray for Chris D.

5. The Jazz Code
Perhaps my most favorite blog post of the year on absolutely my most favorite blog of the year--but do remind me if I said that about others, or if there are some I missed.

6. Zappa Military Industrial Complex and wildly uninformed speculation
Dweezilzappaworld.com. And why not? It seems like a happy place; you got yer music, forum, frequent blog entries by himself--what's not to like? I really do say that with all sincerity. The music "boot camp" thing gave me moment for pause if for no other reason than there's only one Zappa who knows from boot camp--and he'd be the perfect 'pace setter' to really give it an old school MCRD sort of feel. It didn't take much to visualize an alternate reality where completion of boot camp was followed by membership in a larger Zappa franchise reality. Only bands made of boot camp graduates are 'official' or 'legitimate' or some kind of corporate devilry like that. Not that this has been suggested, not that this is the plan, not that I am accusing them of anything of the sort, not that I am acting on any kind of knowledge what so ever (I never do). But what if it was the plan? I mean, isn't larger and larger combinations, conglomerations and trusts the invariable, hard wired behavior of the corporate entity? Is that a newly emerging method of further monetizing / capitalizing on bodies of work that were already done (definitively) by the original, now-unable-to-collect-royalties artist?

7. The Antichrist translated by HL Mencken

Put the kids on the lap, next to the fire, the tree, the stockings and the golden retriever. A new Christmas tradition...

38.

I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am visited by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy--contempt of man. Let me leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am unhappily contemporaneous. The man of today--I am suffocated by his foul breath!...Toward the past, like all who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say, generous self-control: with gloomy caution I pass through whole millennia of this madhouse of a world, call it "Christianity," "Christian faith" or the "Christian church," as you will--I take care not to hold mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment I enter modern times, our times. Our age knows better...What was formerly merely sickly now becomes indecent--it is indecent to be a Christian today. And here my disgust begins. I look about me: not a word survives of what was once called "truth"; we can no longer bear to hear a priest pronounce the word. Even a man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity must know that a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but actually lies--and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through "innocence" or "ignorance." The priest knows as everyone knows, that there is no longer any "God," or any "sinner," or any "Savior"--that "free will" and the moral order of the world" are lies--: serious reflection, the profound self-conquest of the spirit, allow no man to pretend that he does not know it...All the ideas of the church are now recognized for what they are--as the worst counterfeits in existence, invented to debase nature and all natural values; the priest himself is seen as he actually is--as the most dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous spider of creation.

Talk about rain drops on roses and whiskers on kittens! The Anti-Christ really is some great reading by the stockings (hung with care,) or while hanging around the Christmas tree next to the fire.

8. Record I have not yet acquired

a. Bill Dixon: Tapestries for Small Orchestra
b. Bill Dixon: Weight / Counterweight

Two sides of the same Dixonian coin--a large group (aka "Small Orchestra") and a trio featuring two drummers.

Not to play favorites with two things I haven't even heard, but I must admit that I am slightly more eager to hear Dixon with two drummers--not that I don't love Dixon's work with larger ensemble--it's just that the two drummer + Dixon modality brings to mind a certain Dixon concert at the St. Mark's church featuring Arthur Brooks, J.R. Mitchell and Gary Sojkowski. Said concert left a huge dent in my musical consciousness and that sparse harmonic setting gave Dixon a certain kind of "room" (dare I say "freedom") to play the horn. There is however, the turntable situation, particularly the not having of one. Perhaps Santa will put one under the tree for me--I'll let you know how that goes.

+ + +

And that's my top 8 list for 2009. Woo Hoo! Rumor has it #9 and #10 will be posted soon at Brilliantcornersabostonjazzblog.blogspot.com. But you go there regularly, and so didn't need me to tell you that.

EVERYONE HAVE A GREAT AND FUN 2010!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

John Blum, Sabir Mateen, Michael Wimberly, Winter Solstice You Lucky New Yorkers

2009-12-17T00:56:00.001-08:00

John Blum

Sabir Mateen

Michael Wimberly

and perhaps a very special guest on bass

Live at Pianos
158 Ludlow
$5 door, no minimum
9pm December 21 2009

It's not every day you get to hear John Blum perform--and that's a goddamn shame.

John is totally the real deal. Take for example his new record In the Shade of the Sun--his second recorded outing with undeniable ledgends William Parker and Sunny Murray.

Raise hands, how many of you out there have made two records with William Parker and Sunny Murray?

John will be performing with woodwind master Sabir Mateen as well as the remarkable Michael Wimberly. Any one of them doing a solo concert is likely to be the thing happening in all five burroughs. The three of them together, to say nothing of the theoretical 'perhaps' of a special guest on bass, is without question the hippest way to spend the solistice for at least 150 miles in any given direction--straight up and straight down included.

So get the down to Pianos 158 Ludlow, in beautiful lower Manhattan, this solstice (December 21st) at 9pm!

Dixon v. Fletcher, a Celebration

2009-11-22T23:22:00.000-08:00

Though both neglected to mention Nick Skrowaczewski's central roll in all of it, it's true what both Chris Rich and Stephen Haynes have said: there was indeed a gathering of the Citizen's Orchestra--a group for which the seeds were planted in 2007. It is also true that there was a decidedly celebratory Dixonian undertone to the event, if for no other reason than the ensemble was in part comprised of at least 3 generations of Dixon students and colleagues and Dixon himself was there.

But before we get too D-Listed about it, some things:

Before arriving in lovely lovely Cambridge, home of the S & S restaurant, The Outpost 186 and Draper labs, my mother and I took a trip to the dump to dutifully recycle our recyclables. At said garbage dump, as if it had been put there just for me, I found a copy of Dag Hammarskjold's aphoristic Markings, translated from the Swedish by Leif Sjoberg & W.H. Auden with a forward by W.H. Auden.

Of course we all know W.H. Auden loved him some aphorisms and what's more, you don't need to get those self-congratulatory propaganda pamphlets regularly grunted out of that all girl drama school to know that W.H. Auden did a stint (as a visiting professor) at Bennington College, (though he was long gone by the time Dixon began teaching.)

In reading Markings, these caught my eye, and by "caught my eye" I mean made me think of Dixon:

"Upon my conditions."* To live under that sign is to purchase knowledge about the Way at the price of loneliness.

* A quotation from Vilhelm Ekelund, a Swedish aphorist, who had a considerable influence on Hammarskjold (W.H.A.)

You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn't reserve a plot for weeds.

Never, "for the sake of peace and quiet," deny your own experience or convictions.

Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, p. 12, 15 and 84.

While that bit of synchronicity sat moldering in my consciousness, it moldered quietly in the shadows of some things Angus Fletcher wrote in his book A New Theory for American Poetry--writings and ideas which played no small part in informing my hopes, dreams and strategies for the upcoming Outpost 186 performance:

Aggregation and the forming of the ensemble allow the phrase to become the centrally natural linguistic expression of democracy, for good or ill. The phrase bespeaks through in its most immediate, unreticulated, even fragmentary form...When (Whitman) entitles poems simply "Thoughts," he names his general procedure, almost as if he were Amy Lowell calling her famous imagist poem "Patterns." The Whitman procedure is to vary the shapes of the poems--the complete poetic enclosures--so changingly, with such architectonic variety, that he can find places for a seemingly infinite number and variety of previously unreticulated thoughts...

There was thus no conflict in Whitman's mind when he related his politically grounded poetry to the wildness of the Rocky Mountains, which he saw for the first time from the seat of a railroad train:

"I have found the law of my own poems," was the unspoken but more-and-more decided feeling that came to me...

Angus Fletcher, A New Theory For American Poetry, p.112-113

and further:

If for chaos of values we substitute complexity of images, [complexity of sounds] we discover Complexity Theory, a uniquely germane notion for studying chaotic phenomena in literature. Edward Lorenz, the meteorologist who discovered the "butterfly effect," chose the words "full chaos" to mean completely random disorder, complete lack of order. To back away from Lorenz's full chaos into a less aggravated lack of order, we might ask: what looks [or sounds] like chaos, but is not? The reader will be ready for my answer to this rhetorical question: an Ashbery poem [improvised music]. If that is right, the poem will have to be an attenuated case of controlling chaotic disorder. This will have to be a chaos with rules. Literature and the other arts have traditionally played on the margins of disorder, and in stories have always shown us what happens when "life gets too complicated." We want a denouement, and we treasure ancient Greek literature for showing how such clarifications emerge, often tragically, when the Sophoclean plot of complexity is at last concluded. For confronting this question, Complexity Theory deals with theories of nature, theories that remain uncontaminated by teleological beliefs. In this field things are not imagined to be inevitable just because they have been called "natural." Poets [improvising musicians] are in many ways concerned with the primitive, but they should not uncritically be associated with blind fundamentalist beliefs in divinely ordered teleology, since poets [improvisers] employ the main scientific idea in Complexity, the notion of a self-organizing-system.

For reasons that will emerge, the poetry of John Ashbery [or the music of Bill Dixon] demonstrates the complex in a theoretical sense, and we need not shanghai him to make the point. A typical Ashbery poem [piece of music by Bill Dixon] lacks an obvious plot with stereotyped events whose sequence is standardized. Descriptions begin, are at once interrupted, turning left and right into other partial delineations. Voices come and go, fading in and out of earshot. Harold Bloom, ironically calling himself and exegete, admitted that "it was difficult to see how Ashbery got from point to point, or even to determine if there were points." This sense of broken line inhered, for Bloom, in what he called the poem's [improvisation's] "procedure." In this case a splendid reader and apologist for these poems, he seems insufficiently to measure the relation between procedure and process, which might come from our recognizing that Ashbery's meditative sequences lead to organized happenings. We no longer need the casual outlines of a logical or coherently compelling sequence of actions; rather, we need a coherence of perceptions, crowing each other for simultaneous recognition like children at a birthday party.

...You will say, all serious activities, including the activity in and around a poem (improvisation), are surely attentive. But in fact most poetry ["Jazz"] is deliberately inattentive. It dwells in memorized formulas (ballads); it dwells in romantic exaggerations and hyperboles ("My love is like a red red rose"); it dwells in the great generalized traditions of myth, those stories appearing everywhere as the loosely ordered structures of poetry and literature; it dwells in a studied indirectness and obliquity which are the very opposite of attentively observed reality.

Ibid, p. 192-194

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A music that comes from a self-organizing-system.

A music uncontaminated by teleological beliefs

A music that no longer needs the causal outlines of a logical or coherently compelling sequence of actions

A music born of a coherence of perceptions.

Yeah baby! That's what I'm talking about!

Before such radical notions were foisted upon the big group at Outpost 186, I was lucky enough to do a bit of recording at WKCR a few days before. A trio session with Sabir Mateen and Matt Lavelle. When asked what the groups name was, I offered "The Self Organized Clarinet Trio." Matt came up with the "Black Wood Brotherhood" (or was it society?) Either way, the group was, in fact, a self organized system, uncontaminated by teleological beliefs, needing no causal outlines of a logical or coherently compelling sequence of actions, born of a coherence of perceptions.

If it ever airs, I'll let you know so the two or three of you reading this can "judge" its "worth"--if it was a "success."

As groovy as that was, and as much as I enjoyed the experience of making that music, self organization was not the order of the day with the large group. At the rehearsal the day before, attempts at operating as a self-organized-system were, uh, not universally embraced.

After a few of these un-embraces, Dixon had this to say:

“...One of the errors that stays with this music is that ‘if you just wait the music is going to construct itself and you will have done nothing’

The difference between this music and other areas of music has to do with the responsibility for the erection of the piece of music. It is 100% on the shoulders of each player. When someone writes a piece of music, the responsibilities for detailing what each of you need to know to make it into a cohesive whole is on the person who writes the music. So for many years you don’t pay it any attention and then a sliver of light…freedom…and people say: oh freedom…we don’t need to do this and still you don’t pay it any attention..”

There is just as much discipline and as many rules and variables as in a piece of [written] music. You sit down and construct it as it is happening as is in a piece that someone else does. So your responsibilities as players are the same.

It would appear Dixon is not as convinced of the notion of the self-organizing-system in this music as Angus Fletcher is with regards to the poetry of John Ashbery. Though I'm not entirely sure the one invalidates the other, it could very well be they do. Yes yes, poetry and music = two different things, but really now just how different is "self organized" and "self constructed?"

And so it was that Stephen Haynes stepped in to provide a causal outline of a logical and coherently compelling sequence of actions. You know, leadership. Though hardly Buddy Rich, there was hierarchy. In the end, it was not an evening of metaphysical naturalism. You could almost hear the unclenching and smell the relief once the burden of self organization was lifted from the ensemble and put upon a leader. That is neither complaint nor judgment.

Though I didn't get any feed back at the performance, I do seem to recall a woman in a hat sharing her relief that there was some teleology, some hierarchy and a causal outline of a logical and coherently compelling sequence of actions. I don't remember anyone complaining about this, though it would be interesting to hear what those complaints sound like if indeed there were any.

Were that group of eleven to stay together for the next 5 years, provided music still exists 5 years from now, would there still be the need for causal outlines of a logical and coherently compelling sequence of actions--or would that group be able to play with the same self-organization as did the clarinet trio at WKCR? And if it could, would that be an artistic/aesthetic advance or an artistic/aesthetic retreat?

What requires more "attention"--a self organized music, or a music with heirarchy and a causal outline of a logical and coherently compelling sequence of actions?

Does "attention" (like "energy") define its own kind of music?

Will the day ever come when music will need no definition?

Regardless of the answers, it was a gaye olde time and I would like to hereby thank all the musicians involved:

Laurence Cook
Kevin Frenette
Forbes Graham
Stephen Haynes
Jim Hobbes
Christopher Kottke
Glynis Lomon
Nick Skrowaczewski
Jacob William
Eric Zinman

And lastly, a big thanks to Bill Dixon for coming coming to the performance.

Shoulder Seasons

2009-10-19T15:05:00.000-07:00

The pitifulness of my inability to maintain a blog of monthly hurtwords is as not-lost on me as I am sure it is as not-lost on the two or three of you who, at one point, visited this relatively regular blog with relative regularity.

I blame my dying local economy, my dying Ford automobile and my dying sense of relevance in the shadow of the great Brilliantcornersabostonjazzblog. Chris Rich--the Covering Cherub of the blog world.

And while the sad passing of the great Joe Maneri should have prompted immediate eulogy, it instead prompted great sadness, which in turn prompted great sloth. While I didn't know Joe personally, I did get to speak with him on the phone twice, and exchanged a few letters.

I became aware of Joe Maneri at the perfect time--the early 90's when (in New York City) Charles Gayle was in full flower. Right around the time of Repent. (Is that even possible? Perhaps it was a little later than Repent. You get the jist...) Joe (another religious man and admirer of Padre Pio) did the amazing, namely partitioning space in my listening-consciousness for another approach to the Tenor Saxophone. He did so on the recording Get Ready to Receive Yourself--a must get if you haven't gotten already.

[On a related note, since beginning this post, the great Sirone has also passed away who's wonderful bass playing graces perhaps my most favorite Charles Gayle recording, Spirits Before. Just like the ol' saying goes--if things are going your way, just wait...]

On a happier note, Bill Dixon did turn 84, and in honor of that, it was nice to see some original content up on that Dixon Society site: a short clip of Bill Dixon rehearsing before his performance at the 2007 Vision Festival.

So it's been joys and sorrows, thanks for asking.

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As far as hurt words are concerned, the Marxist hurt word trajectory is going to have to wait until I actually get a copy of Capital of my own--preferably not the penguin edition as their particular ultra thrifty take on typography and layout has an uncanny ability to make any time of the day into nap time.

In between nap-times, I recently found a very strange book in a thrift store called The Neo-Tech Discovery (Zonpower). It is fascinating on many levels, for many reasons, most of which are irrelevant to even this blog (like its typography and layout, for example.)

In this book, however, there is a listing of the 114 Neo-Tech Advantages, which when read one after another are like poetry:

The Nature of Man and Woman

Child of the Past

Carving One's Own Destiny

Dogma and Rules Eliminated

(and so on for another 110 lines)

The Neo-Tech advantage that got my attention was #104: Destructive Poetry Versus Valid Art:

...Since the value of art can be sensed through emotions and requires no intellectual analysis, the public needs only to notice the obvious art and architectural values to erroneously link those values of the master artists to the master neocheaters presenting that art. Thus, the masses are deluded into seeing those obvious values of great art as also representing the values of the neocheating church or government. Subconsciously they conclude: "I can see, hear, and feel those architectural, art and musical values. I know those values are real and valid. Thus, those values must also represent those who own and present this art--the church or government. Therefore, all that I do not comprehend about the church or government must be as good and valuable as the art that represents them."

Through that brilliant, but dishonest use of art as non sequiturs, the church and governments were able to survive the rise of honesty and logic during the Renaissance, the resulting industrial revolution, and then the rise of capitalism and free enterprise.

Regardless of their understandings or economic conditions at that time, those great artists betrayed honesty by selling themselves to the dishonest intentions of the neocheaters in church and government. Those artists are culpable and responsible for giving a major boost in power and endurance to the evil machinations of especially the Roman Catholic church and its neocheating leaders. Even Michelangelo must be held accountable. His great work in the widest context must be condemned as a net disvalue to human life for the dishonest role it played in supporting the immoral mystics and destructive neocheaters throughout the subsequent ages. Without selling out, he might have lost some immediate prosperity and fame. But if he had stayed honest to reality, his work would have risen to even greater beauty, value and fame.

Wallace, Frank R. The Neo-Tech Discover (Zone Power) p. 222

A little further along, there is this

Modern Art

Below is a quote from the archangel of modern art admitting that he is nothing but a clown:

"Most people can today no longer expect to receive consolation from art. The refined, the rich, the distillers of quintessence (art critics) desire only the peculiar, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. And I myself, since the advent of cubism, have fed these fellow what they wanted, and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my head.

"The less they understood them, the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd farces, I became celebrated. But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the owrd. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt and Goya, they were great painters. I am only a public clown.

"I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession of mine--more painful than it may seem. but at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest."

Pablo Picasso, November, 1951* A master neocheater making an honest confession

*Also reported to be from a fictitious interview: The Black Book by Giovanni Papini, 1951

To "appreciate" modern art, a person must figure out, interpret, or understand the "artist" and his meanings that "transcend reality". By contrast, all lasting classical art of great value is immediately recognized as a value by everyone through all ages. Such art needs no interpretation or understanding of the artist. such art represents beauty, values, and skill that are immediately recognized by the expert and the untrained layman alike. That is why the Roman Catholic church acquired only classic art--art that needs no interpretation to understand and value. The Catholic church was too shrewd to buy abstract art needing interpretation.

Indeed, modern art seldom represents beauty, values, or skill. Moreover, the layman does not know what mostly modern "art" means, while the chic "expert" plays phony games of interpreting the artist's meanings.

Today, the high prices of famous modern art works are supported by the tax-deduction system: Wealthy holders of such modern art profit handsomely by donating purchased works to the major modern-art museums (e.g., The Museum of Modern Art in New York). In turn, such museums provide grossly inflated appraisal prices for tax deductions. Thus, those museums gain ersatz art works along with cash donations for those fake, tax-purpose appraisals. At the same time, the wealthy "collectors" profit and modern-art museums perpetuate themselves through the tax system. When that neocheating scheme collapses, most modern art works will fall to an objective free-market value and become essentially worthless.

Ibid, p. 228-230

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Wow. How about them apples? So much to agree and disagree with all at once.

Artist culpability caught my attention, as did art needing no intellectual analysis, the culpability of Michaelangelo, Picasso as public clown and last but not least, the essential worthlessness of modern art.

Most exciting of all, however, was the high price of art not as indication of 'merit' but as function of the tax deduction system. I've always admired the visual art world, and largely for this reason--kudos to them!

While it would appear that "Jazz" is trying to bust that move (cf. Jazz at Lincoln Center) it would also appear that "free jazz" or "improvised music" or "the music that supplanted Jazz as the premier art music of the day" or whatever you want to call it has, by-in-large totally failed at getting in on that special kind of corruption in any (monetarily) meaningful way.

In the absence of any other aesthetic unifying characteristic, it could very well be that it is this failing that defines "this music."

Could it be that the ultimate definition of "this music" is that of a music which cannot be used by the capitalist for the ultimately nefarious ends of the capitalist in any meaningful, big money way? A garlic-and-vampire sort of thing. An exchange value/use value sort of thing.

And so to my fellow makers of "this music" I ask this: If this were in fact the case, would you open a vein or jump for joy or something in between?

The Fun, Expert, Tickle Trunk

2009-07-27T13:34:00.000-07:00

It's been a while, and to the (now) two or three of you who still regularly check in, I apologise. Summertime here on Christmas Island is filled with guests and travel and employment. I've been enjoying all three, in one capacity or another--some more than others.

Guests I like because the guest is to be cherished.

Employment I like because you need to be employed to get unemployment.

Travel I like because other people have been doing it for me, namely going to wild, wacky, wonderful Portland to get some of my books--namely my "happy fun books" as the getter of said books called them. The box is thus a "tickle trunk" of sorts, as the words and thoughts there in are a non stop source of giggles and mirth.

Certainly you have a tickle trunk of your own, and everyone loves summertime reading...what's in your fun time summer reading tickle trunk? Answer in the comments!!!

Here's my list, with some fun excerpts:

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Fanon, Frantz: The Wretched of the Earth (with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre)

p210-211
When we consider the efforts made to carry out the cultural estrangement so characteristic of the colonial epoch, we realise that nothing has been left to chance and that the total result looked for by colonial domination was indeed to convince the natives that colonialism came to lighten their darkness. The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into the natives' heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality.

On the unconscious plane, colonialism therefore did not seek to be considered by the native as a gentle, loving mother who protects her child from a hostile environment, but rather as a mother who unceasingly restrains her fundamentally perverse offspring from managing to commit suicide and from giving free rein to its evil instincts. The colonial mother protects her child from itself, from its ego, and from its physiology, its biology, and its own unhappiness which is its very essence.

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Said, Edward W.: Culture and Imperialism

p.189
An extraordinary, but nevertheless typical, example of American wilfulness is at hand in the relationship between Haiti and the United States. As J. Michael Dash reads it in Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination, almost from the moment Haiti gained its independence as a Black republic in 1803 Americans tended to imagine it as a void into which they could pour their own ideas. Abolitionists, says Dash, thought of Haiti not as a place with its own integrity and people but as a convenient site for relocating feed slaves. Later the island and its people came to represent degeneracy and of course racial inferiority. The United States occupied the island in 1915 (and Nicaragua in 1916) and set in place a native tyranny that exacerbated an already desperate state of affairs. (15) And when in 1991 and 1992 thousands of Haitian refugees tried to gain entry into Florida, most were forcibly returned.

Few Americans have agonised over places like Haiti or Iraq once the crisis or their country's actual intervention was over. Strangely, and despite both its intercontinental range and its genuinely various elements, American domination is insular. The foreign-policy elite has no long-standing tradition of direct rule overseas, as was the case with the British or the French, so American attention works in spurts; great masses of rhetoric and huge resources are lavished somewhere (Vietnam, Libya, Iraq, Panama), followed by virtual silence. Again Kiernan: "More multifarious than the British empire, the new hegemony was even less capable of finding any coherent programme of action other than of bullheaded negation. Hence its readiness to let plans be made for it, by company directors or secret agents."(16)

(15) See J. Michael Dash, Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination (London: Macmillian, 1988), pp. 9, 22-25 and passim.

(16) V. G. Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony (London: Zed, 1978) p.206

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Debord, Guy: The Society of the Spectacle

12. The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. All it says is: "Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear." The attitude that it demands in principle is the same passive acceptance that it has already secured by means of its seeming incontrovertibly, and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of appearances.

24. By means of the spectacle the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise. The spectacle is the self-portrait of power in the age of power's totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence. The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in spectacular relationships conceals their true character as relationships between human beings and between classes; a Second Nature thus seems to impose inescapable laws upon our environment. but the spectacle is by no means the inevitable outcome of a technical development perceived as natural; on the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle -- understood in the limited sense of those "mass media" that are its most stultifying superficial manifestation -- seems at times to be invading society in the shape of a mere apparatus, it should be remembered that this apparatus has nothing neutral about it, and that it answers precisely to the needs of the spectacle's internal dynamics. If the social requirements of the age which develops such techniques can be met only through their mediation, if the administration of society and all contact between people now depends on the intervention of such "instant" communication, it is because this "communication" is essentially one-way; the concentration of the media thus amounts to the monopolization by the administrators of the existing system of the means to pursue their particular form of administration. The social cleavage that the spectacle expresses is inseparable from the modern State, which, as the product of the social division of labour and the organ of class rule, is the general form of all social division.

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Dixon, Bill: L'Opera

p.33-34
...it would seem that instead of the constant, repetitious cant about (i) how things are done at Bennington; (ii) this is the Bennington way of doing things; (iii) the specialness of the Bennington students (which, after a while, makes one just a bit curious as to why so much time should be spent defending what is done rather than letting /as it does most eloquently/ one view or hear any of the works that are done, where one can immediately be made aware that there is, indeed, a 'Bennington way' of both learning and presenting what has been theoretically within the purview of the listener /in the instance of music/), there would be an attempt to let the work, etc. speak for itself.

It also doesn't seem to me that trying to spark a conversation about what might just be the EXPECTATION of a Bennington student who has made the indication of expecting to MAJOR in the subject (music) can at all be even remotely related to treachery or being negative. Why then the resistance to HONEST dialogue, since honest dialogue would certainly include those things that would have to be both wrong with the place (the inadequacies, probably other goals) that while not possibly attainable at this time might also be composed of those things and ideas that one might feel would certainly aid in the teaching and learning and thus would auger well for the future of the college in terms of an elevation of the program and a more forward looking attitude concerning the future. It is an ancient and outmoded idea that at Bennington the acme of teaching of the subject has not only been attained by those in the Music Division, but even worse, that there is no way (if that is the case) that it cannot only be improved upon but that one cannot even suggest it. Not refuting this, it obviously either affects preservation or protection of ideals or philosophies that serve to support or reinforce rather thoroughly entrenched ideas that music conceived and performed from the standpoint of Western formal concert philosophies (white, if you will) should always and unreservedly serve as the theoretical and philosophical modus operandi for all music study (at this place) with the result that any other idea or aspect of music and how it is considered convenient, sometimes serve as some sort of obscure, exotic phenomenon.

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Young, Ben: Dixonia

p.181-182
Bill Dixon: "The Bennington Music Division had said that there was no such thing as Black Music, so I had no basis to say that I wanted the music to be taught here unless I could prove it. They didn't want to include it on any level. 1. They didn't think it existed as an aesthetic. 2. They couldn't do it. 3. In the past they had evinced no interest in it. So the first thing I did was to research everything that had ever been taught at the school--just for information. I found out about the Jazz weekend that they had done in 1964 and a couple of things that Lou Calabro had tried to do with improvisation. Then I was able to frame my thesis: 'You're saying Black Music doesn't exist because that's not within your purview'. Then I made a proposal that I be allowed to head a Black Music Institute--an independent entity, separate from all of the existing divisions--for which I would answer to the President. After that proposal, everyone became outraged along the lines of 'Who does he think he is? Why can't he just be in a department like everybody else?' That was turned down flatly when I first brought it up in 1973, a little while after I came back from Madison. So I went back to the drawing board and made a request to do this thing for a year--with the curriculum, budget, and everything all figured out. I was willing to make this 'audition' for a year, and if I passed I wanted to request being made the eighth department of the college.

What happened next is really a book in itself. I was attacked in every way imaginable. The Music Department fought it as viciously as they could, but when they realised it was being considered they had to back off."

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Mencken, H. L.: Minority Report

260
Life on this earth is not only without rational significance, but also apparently unintentional. The cosmic laws seem to have been set going for some purpose quite unrelated to human existence. Man is thus a sort of accidental by-product, as the sparks are an accidental by-product of the horse shoe a blacksmith fashions on his anvil. The sparks are far more brilliant than the horseshoe, but all the same they remain essentially meaningless. They constitute, at best, a disease of the horseshoe--the involve a destruction of its tissue. Perhaps life, in the same way, is a disease of the cosmos.

269
Artists can seldom account for their own work, and when they show actual genius hardly ever. The moment they try to explain it they become absurd, and what they have to say is commonly borrowed from the jargon of critics, which is to say, non-artists. The process of creation is only partly intellectual. The rest of it seems to be based on instinct rather than on idea.

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Fukuoka, Masanobu: The Natural Way of Farming--The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy

p.27-28
Leave Nature Alone.

Man has always deluded himself into thinking that he knows nature and is free to use it as he wishes to build his civilisation. But nature cannot be explained or expanded upon. As an organic whole, it is not subject to man's classifications; nor does it tolerate dissection and analysis. Once broken down, nature cannot be returned to its original state. All that remains is an empty skeleton devoid of the true essence of living nature. This skeletal image only serves to confuse man and lead him further astray. Nor is scientific reasoning of any avail in helping man understand nature and add to its creations.

Nature as perceived by man through discriminating knowledge is a falsehood. Man can never truly know even a single leaf, even a single handful of earth. Unable to fully comprehend plant life and soil, he sees these only through the filter of human intellect.

Although he may seek to return to the bosom of nature or use it to his advantage, he only touches one tiny part of nature--a dead portion at that--and has no affinity with the main body of living nature. he is, in effect, merely toying with delusions.

Man is but an arrogant fool who vainly believes that he knows all of nature and can achieve anything he sets his mind to. Seeing neither the logic nor order inherent in nature, he has selfishly appropriated it to his own ends and destroyed it. The world today is in such a sad state because man has not felt compelled to reflect upon the dangers of his high-handed ways.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich: Daybreak

177
Learning solitude. -- O you poor devils in the great cities of world politics, you gifted young men tormented by ambition who consider it your duty to pass some comment on everything that happens--and there is always something happening! Who when they raise the dust are always on the alert, always on the lookout for the moment when they can put their word in, lose all genuine productivity! However much they may desire to do great work, the profound speechlessness of pregnancy never comes to them! The event of the day drives them before it like chaff, while they think they are driving the event--poor devils! -- If one wants to represent a hero on the stage one must not think of making one of the chorus, indeed one must not even know how to make one of the chorus.

[does he mean "be in the chorus?"]

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Nietzsche, Friedrich: On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo

204
End and goal.--Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; and yet: as long as the melody has not reached its end, it also hasn't reached its goal. A parable.

[this reminds me of Bill Dixon discouraging "cadences" in our playing in ensemble class--the non resolving line.]

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Nietzsche, Friedrich: Human, All Too Human

152
Art of the ugly soul. -- One imposes far too narrow limitations on art when one demands that only well-ordered, morally balanced souls may express themselves in it. As in the plastic arts, so in music and poetry too there is an art of the ugly soul beside the art of the beautiful soul; and the mightiest effects of art, that which tames souls, moves stones and humanizes the beast, have perhaps been mostly achieved by precisely that art.

289
Value of illness. -- The man who lies ill in bed sometimes discovers that what he is ill from is usually his office, his business or his society and that through them he has lost all circumspection with regard to himself: he acquires this wisdom from the leisure to which his illness has compelled him.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Gay Science

206
When it rains. -- It is raining, and I think of the poor who now huddle together with their many cares and without any practice at concealing these: each is ready and willing to hurt the other and to create for himself a wretched kind of pleasure even when the weather is bad. That and only that is the poverty of the poor.

[fighting over the 'chicken wing']

331
Better deaf than deafened.-- Formerly, one wished to acquire fame and be spoken of. Now that is no longer enough because the market has grown too large; nothing less that screaming will do. As a consequence, even good voices scream till they are hoarse, and the best goods are offered by cracked voices. Without the screaming of those who want to tell and without hoarseness there no longer is any genius.

This is surely an evil age for a thinker. He has to learn how to find his silence between to noises and to pretend to be deaf until he really becomes deaf. Until he has learned this, to be sure, he runs the risk of perishing of impatience and headaches. (60)

(60) Partly for the reasons noted here, partly because he was competing with Wagner, and partly because his solitude and the lack of any response to his books became intolerable for him, the tone of Nietzsche's own books grew shrill in the end.

[I'm sure I have no idea what they're talking about...]

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Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Anti-Christ (translated by H.L. Mencken)

3
The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures (--man is an end--): but what type of man must be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future.

This most valuable type has appeared often enough in the past but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been almost the terror of terrors;--and out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man--the Christian.

37
--Our age is proud of its historical sense: how, then, could it delude itself into believing that the crude fable of the wonder-worker and Saviour constituted the beginnings of Christianity--from the death on the cross onward--is the history of a progressively clumsier misunderstanding of an original symbolism. With every extension of Christianity among larger and ruder masses, even less capable of grasping the principles that gave birth to it, the need arose to make it more and more vulgar and barbarous--it absorbed the teachings and rites of all the subterranean cults of the imperium Romanum, and the absurdities engendered by all sorts of sickly reasoning. It was the fate of Christianity that its faith had to become as sickly, as low and as vulgar, as the needs were sickly, low and vulgar to which it had to administer. A sickly barbarism finally lifts itself to power as the church--the church, that incarnation of deadly hostility to all honesty, to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all spontaneous and kindly humanity. --Christian values--noble values: it is only we, we free spirits, who have reestablished this greatest of all antithesis in values!

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Berman, Marshall: Adventures in Marxism

p.51
Marx goes on to say, "At the historical dawn of capitalist accumulation -- and every capitalist upstart must go through this historical phase -- avarice, and the desire to get rich, are the ruling passions." (Here Marx makes the curious nineteenth-century assumption, found in every great thinker from Hegel through Freud, that each individual must re-enact in his own life the entire previous life of the species.) These passions never pass away. But later on, "when a certain stage of development has been reached, ... there is at the same time developed in his breast a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation and the desire for enjoyment" (650-51). In this "consumer" period the capitalist becomes like other men: he regards himself as a free agent, able to step back form his role as producer and accumulator, even to give it up entirely ofr the sake of pleasure or happiness; for the first time he sees his life as an open book, as something to be shaped according to his choice. Fetishism, then, infuses the youthful exuberance of capitalism with a religious zeal--and may slacken the pace, but leaves a new freedom in its wake. Men no longer feel compelled to fullfil the infinite demands of an alien Will; they are free at last to think of themselves.

p133-134
The basic fact of life for these intellectuals, as Marx sees them, is that they are "paid wage-labourers" of the bourgeoisie, members of "the modern working class, the proletariat." They may deny this identity--after all, who wants to belong to the proletariat? -- but they are thrown into the working class by the historically defined conditions under which they are forced to work. When Marx describes intellectuals as wage earners, he is trying to make us see modern culture as part of modern industry. Art, physical science, social theory like Marx's own, all are modes of production; the bourgeoisie controls the means of production in culture, as in everything else, and anyone who wants to create must work in the orbit of its power.

Modern professionals, intellectuals and artists, insofar as they are members of the proletariat,

live only so long as they find work, and ... find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These workers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market (479)

Thus they can wrote books, paint pictures, discover physical or historical laws, save lives, only if someone with capital will pay them. But the pressures of bourgeois society are such that no one will pay them unless it pays to pay them -- that is, unless their works somehow help to "increase capital." They must "sell themselves piecemeal" to an employer willing to exploit their brains for profit. They must scheme and hustle to present themselves in a maximally profitable light; they must compete (often brutally and unscrupulously) for the privilege of being bought, simply in order to go on with their work. Once the work is done they are, like all other workers, separated from the products of their labor. Their goods and services go on sale, and it is "the vicissitudes of competition, the fluctuations of the market," rather than any intrinsic truth or beauty or value--or, for that matter, any lack of truth or beauty or value -- that will determine their fate. Marx does not expect that great ideas and works will fall stillborn for want of a market: the modern bourgeoisie is remarkably resourceful in wringing profit out of thought. What will happen instead is that creative processes and products will be used and transformed in ways that will dumbfound or horrify their creators. But the creators will be powerless to resist, because they must sell their labour power in order to live.

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Berman, Marshall: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

p.100
If we look behind the sober scenes that the members of our bourgeoisie create, and see the way they really work and act, we see that these solid citizens would tear down the world if it paid. Even as they frighten everyone with fantasies of proletarian rapacity and revenge, they themselves, through their inexhaustible dealing and developing, hurtle masses of men, materials and money up and down the earth, and erode or explode the foundations of everyone's lives as they go. Their secret--a secret they have managed to keep even from themselves--is that, behind their facades, they are the most violently destructive ruling class in history. All the anarchic, measureless, explosive drives that a later generation will baptise by the name of "nihilism"--drives that Nietzsche and his followers will ascribe to such cosmic traumas as the Death of God--are located by Marx in the seemingly banal everyday working of the market economy. He unveils the modern bourgeois as consummate nihilists on a far vaster scale than modern intellectuals can conceive.* But these bourgeois have alienated themselves from their own creativity because they cannot bear to look into the moral, social and psycic abyss that their creativity opens up.

* Actually, the term "nihilism" springs from Marx's own generation: it was coined by Turgenev as a motto for his radical hero Bazarov in Fathers and Sons (1861), and elaborated in a far more serious way by Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground (1864) and Crime and Punishment (1866-67). Nietzsche explores the sources and meanings of nihilism most proundly in The Will to Power (1885-88), especially in Book One, "European Nihilism." It is rarely mentioned, but but worth noting, that Nietzsche considered modern politics and economics profoundly nihilistic in their own right. See Section 1, an inventory of the roots of contemporary nihilism. Some of Nietzsche's images and analyses here have a surprisingly Marxistic ring. See Section 63 on the spiritual consequences, both negative and positive, of "the fact of credit, or world wide trade and means of transportation"; 67 on "the breaking up of landed property...newspapers (in place of daily prayers), railway, telegraph. Centralization of a tremendous number of interests in a single soul, which for that reason must be very strong and protean." (Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, Vintage, 1968.) But these connections between the modern soul and the modern economy are never worked out by Nietzsche, and (with very rare exceptions) never even noticed by his followers.)

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Hughes, Robert: Culture of Complaint, The Fraying of America

p.185-186
Throughout the whole history of the avant-garde, this hope has been refuted by experience. No work of art in the 20th century has ever been refuted by experience. NO work of art in the 20th century has ever had the kind of impact that Uncle Tom's Cabin did on the way Americans thought about slavery, or The Gulag Archipelago did on illusions about the real nature of Communism. The most celebrated, widely reproduced and universally recognizable political painting of the 20th century is Picasso's Guernica, and it didn't change Franco's regime one inch or shorten his life by so much as one day. what really changes political opinion is events, arguments, press photographs, and TV.

The catalogue convention of the 90s is to dwell on activist artists "addressing issues" of racism, sexism, AIDS, and so forth. But an artist's merits are not a function of his or her gender, ideology, sexual preference, skin color or medical condition, and to address an issue is not to address a public. The HIV virus isn't listening. Joe Sixpack isn't looking at the virtuous feminist knockoffs of John Heartfield on the Whitney wall--he's got a Playmate taped on the sheet rock next to the band saw, and all the Babara Krugers in the world aren't going to get him or anyone else to mend his ways. The political art we have in postmodernist America is one long exercise in preaching to the converted. as Adam Gopnik pointed out in the New Yorker when reviewing the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, it consisted basically of taking an unexceptional if obvious idea--"racism is wrong," or "New York shouldn't have thousands of beggars and lunatics on the street" --then coding it so obliquely that when the viewer has re-translated it he feels the glow of being included in what we call the "discourse" of the art world.(6) But the fact that a work of art is about AIDS or bigotry no more endows it with aesthetic merit than the fact that it's about mermaids and palm trees.

(6) Edward Said, "The politics of Knowledge," Raritan, Summer 1991

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Hughes, Robert: Nothing If Not Critical

p.396-397
The market is always converting works of art into passive fictions of eternity and immutability, of transcendent value for which no price may necessarily be too high. When the word priceless crops up, the haggling has only just begun. Hence the battered state of the word masterpiece, which used to mean a work that proved an artist's graduation into full professional skill, but now means an object whose aura and accumulated myth strike people blind temporarily and render their judgement timid. It refers more to myths of status than processes of comparison, and that kind of mythmaking is the seed of what New York dealer Ben Heller, in one of the great Freudian slips of recent art history, was heard to call "creative pricing"

It is the element of fantasy in the art market, the sense that art prices are so weakly tied to more mundane kinds of economic activity, and that there is something neurotic about them, that gives them their odd liability. The art market can be set pitching and rolling by a single act, which is why it is so notoriously vulnerable to manipulation. A ring of three or four promoters can bid up the price of a dubious young star painter at auction and although the New York art world may know what's going on, the collectors in Akron, Ohio, are not to likely to--all they see is the price that was, after all, publicly bid and duly paid, and is henceforth true.

+ + +

Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W.: Dialectic of Enlightenment

p.139
Nothing that the experts have devised as a stimulant must escape the weary eye; no stupidity is allowed in the face of all the trickery; one has to follow everything and even display the smart responses shown and recommended in the film. This raises the question whether the culture industry fullfils the function of diverting minds which it boasts about so loudly. If most of the radio stations and movie theaters were closed down, the consumers would probably not lose so very much. To walk from the street into the movie theater is no longer to enter a world of dream; as soon as the very existence of these institutions no longer made it obligatory to use them, there would be no great urge to do so. Such closures would not be reactionary machine wrecking. The disappointment would be felt not so much by the enthusiasts as by the slow-witted, who are the ones who suffer for everything anyhow. In spite of the films which are intended to complete her integration, the housewife finds in the darkness of the movie theater a place of refuge where she can site for a few hours with nobody watching, just as she use to look out of the window when there were still homes and rest in the evening. The unemployed in the great cities find coolness in the summer and warmth in the winter in these temperature-controlled locations. Otherwise, despite its size, this bloated pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to man's lives. The idea of "fully exploiting" available technical resources and the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of the economic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger.

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Debord, Guy: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

VII
With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media's professionals to give an answer, with a few respectful rectifications or remonstrations. And they are hardly extravagant, even with these, for besides there extreme ignorance, their personal and professional solidarity with the spectacle's overall authority and the society it expresses makes it their duty, and their pleasure, never to diverge from that authority whose majesty must not be threatened. It must not be forgotten that every media professional is bound by wages and other rewards and recompenses to a master, and sometimes to several; and that everyone of them knows he is dispensable.

All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradully reduced to nil by present society's mode of organisation. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer and absolute reassurance. Once there were experts in Etruscan art, and competent ones, for Etruscan art was not for sale. But a period which, for example, finds it profitable to fake by chemical means various famous wines, can only sell them if it has created wine experts able to con connoisseurs into admiring their new, more distinctive flavours...

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Adorno, Theodor W.: Prisms

p.127
Jazz fans, as has once again been emphatically shown by David Riesman, can be divided into two clearly distinguishable groups. In the inner circle sit the experts, or those who consider themselves such--for very often the most passionate devotees, those who flaunt the established terminology and differentiate jazz styles with ponderous pretention, are hardly able to give an account, in precise, technical musical concepts, of whatever it is that so moves them. Most of them consider themselves avant-gardistic, thus participating in a confusion that has become ubiquitous today. Among the symptoms of the disintegration of culture and education, not the least is the fact that the distinction between autonomous 'high' and commercial 'light' art, however questionable it may be, is neither critically reflected nor even noticed any more. And now that certain culturally defeatist intellectuals have pitted the latter against the former, the philistine champions of the culture industry can even take pride in the conviction that they are marching in the vanguard of the Zeitgeist. The organization of culture into 'levels' such as the first, second and third programmes, patterned after low, middle and highbrown, is reprehensible. but it cannot be overcome simply by the lowbrown sects declaring themselves to be highbrow. The legitimate discontent with culture provides a pretext but not the slightest justification for the glorification of a highly rationalized section of mass production, one which debases and betrays culture without at all transcending it, as the dawn of a new world-sensibility or for confusing it with cubism, Eliot's poetry and Joyce's prose. Regression is not origin, but origin is the ideology of regression. Anyone who allows the growing respectability of mass culture to seduce him into equating a popular song with modern art because of a few false notes squeaked by a clarinet; anyone who mistakes a triad studded with 'dirty notes' for atonality, has already capitulated to barbarism. Art which has degenerated to culture pays the price of being all the more readily confused with its own waste products as its aberrant influence grows.

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Hope you have a fun summer!

What What What?

2009-06-01T09:20:00.000-07:00

What do you mean I didn't win the Bad-Plus blogging contest?

What do you mean I can't just keep renewing Capital Vol. 1 again and again and again and again?

My world is collapsing! That's what you get for being a slow reader--a collapsed world!

"Fortunately" here on Christmas Island, capitalism and all its promises saturate the air, water and ether. As such, I don't expect anyone will be taking Capital out of the library, and so tomorrow to the library I will go (with a quick stop at the bank first, so that I may be allowed back into the library) and Capital Vol. 1 will again be mine, even if only temporarily. At that juncture, we will continue with our investigation of the bisect of Marx and our beloved freely improvised music.

In the mean, there's always ol' "abc" Teddy. The ABC meaning "anything but class", and I have to admit, reading Adorno after Marx is kind of like, I dunno, eating the little parsley garnish after eating the steak. Not that the little parsely garnish doesn't have its place, and indeed, who doesn't love a litte garnish? Not that Adorno is light and fluffy or easily brushed off the plate, but there is a bit of difference between the dialectis of employment as exploitation (Marx) and the sillyness of the 6/8 passage in Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto (Adorno.)

Regardless, in the grand game of creating personal exchange value you've got to keep it fresh. (And you shouldn't swear either.)

So with that, while we wait for my library card to cool off and Capital Vol. 1 to return, some adorno:

The true danger of the virtuoso: his perfect control. Through being above the works, having them at his disposal, he no longer journeys all the way into them or takes their immanent demands quite so seriously any more. Sloppiness as a correlate of mastery. For example the blurring of phrases by great virtuosos, also vocal ones. -- Preferable to work with young, unfinished musicians who are not yet fully in control.

and later

Gretel asked me how it can be that actors, who are mostly of questionable intelligence and always uneducated, can represent people and deliver lines that convey the most difficult of ideas, as with Hamlet and Prospero, Faust, Mephistopheles. I ventured the reply: every poetic work contains not only the meaningful-significative element, but also the melodic-mimic aspect, tone, speech melody, and manner; and it is a substantial criterion for success how deeply the former is immersed in the latter, i.e. whether the mimetic, 'magical' aspect is able to invoke, to force the meaningful one, to such a degree that a tone of voice or gesture itself becomes the allegorical representation of an idea. The actor's ability is mimic in the true sense: he actually imitates the melodica-gestural aspect of language. And the more perfectly he achieves this, the more perfectly the idea enteres the representation, not least because -- and especially when -- he does not understand it. The opposite approach would be the explanatory one: but to explain the intention means to kill it rather than invoking it. One could almost say that it is the prerequisite for an actor not to 'understand', but rather to imitate blindly...

Adorno, Theodor. Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, p. 158-159

+ + +

Sloppiness as a correlate of mastery.

For those of you who read reviews of Bill Dixon's music, how many of you have read articles where Dixon's ability to 'play' the trumpet is put into question? For the most part, that seems to have gone out of style, but for a while it was a staple of Dixon criticism.

Why did that change? Did "we" evolve? Are "we" hearing music differently, or are "we" (the transformers of Value into Exchange-Value) faced with the reality that many of the "young, unfinished musicians who are not yet fully in control" (of the instrument or their destiny) sound enough like Dixon, that to continue "asking" if Dixon knows how to play the trumpet might not be good for the collection of surplus capital?

And how about uneducated actors blindly imitating Faust and Mephistopheles while not having the slightest idea of who or what (or from whence) they are imitating? Don't get me wrong, I am a firm believer in "fake it 'till you make it" and I think that spending a life acting and imitating probably a pretty good gig depending upon the pay. What would you rather do, imitate Faust or be Faust?

What would you rather do, imitate Charlie Parker or be Charlie Parker? How about Frank Zappa? Would you rather imitate or would you rather be Frank Zappa? (That might be a trick question.)

Speaking of Frank Zappa, copying, copyrights, ZFT (vs. everyone else,) the concept of "perfection" (expected or otherwise) and the whole conflict-leads-to-sales strategym behind the Zappa-mimesis experience, there is this:

...he actually imitates the melodica-gestural aspect of language. And the more perfectly he achieves this, the more perfectly the idea enteres the representation, not least because -- and especially when -- he does not understand it.

Where, if at all, this bisects "misreading" in the Harold Bloom sense of the word, I don't know. Was (Frank) Zappa imitating the melodica-gestural aspect of language? If so whose? Because if he (Frank Zappa) did, he didn't do it perfectly, as his (Frank Zappa's) music--what you heard (past tense) when you went (also past tense) to a Frank Zappa concert was not like anything ever heard before. Was this because (Frank) Zappa understood what he was doing? Or was it because (Frank) Zappa gave not one fig about sounding like anything or anyone other than Frank Zappa?