August 24, 2000
11:51 PM
Bruce LeClaire offered a (probably, he admits, apocryphal, but damn
it's funny) Monk anecdote on rec.music.bluenote recently:
I recall another anecdote I read about Monk, again my recollection is
vague but I think Budd Johnson was responsible for this one too.
Somehow Monk and Budd (let's say) found themselves alone at a party
(let's say). Monk waved Budd into an empty room with a piano, shut the
door, and then opened up the piano. Budd listened as Monk proceeded to
play the piano exactly in Bud Powell's style, both left and right
hands. After his demonstration Monk closed up the piano and whispered
to Budd, "I just wanted to show you, but don't tell anyone else I can
play like that."
10:51 PM
Having fun with my new extended (who really needs a book until May 10,
2001 starting now anyway?) checkout at the library, I got a stack
of music books today: Miles Davis' autobiography, Lewis Porter's
Coltrane: His Life and Music, a biography of Thelonious Monk,
David Toop's Rap Attack 3, and a book about the value of
popular music by Simon Frith called Performing Rites.
Strangely the sizeable holdings of the Parks Library at good old ISU
are not sizeable enough to contain a copy of Charles Mingus' biography,
written in a strange combination of third and first persons, Beneath
the Underdog.
Why the library rush? Despite a strong affection for libraries early
in my life (they have all these books, see, and they let you have
them and read them for free), I don't like to use the library much any
more. I have a compulsion to own any book that I read, which means
I don't get around to reading some things just because I never feel
like spending the money on them (biographies, for instance, seem too
light to me - I'll probably finish the first one I start in a day or
two of quick reading).
But, I finally have a burning need to know more about some of my
favorite music and musicians, and as great as the net is, it's just
a little too fragmentary for some things (I say, writing in a blog...).
Expect some comments soon on the books (and I'm still thinking about
the Hancock comments I promised below).
August 23, 2000
10:45 PM
Another minor quibble: the second of the 3 LPs reproduced on
the Hancock Warner Brothers set is spread over the two CDs.
Doh.
9:15 PM
Quotes from the liner notes to Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi:
The Complete Warner Brothers Recordings (which includes
the jazz-funk of Fat Albert Rotunda, and the impressionism
and funk-fusion of Mwandishi and Crossings, which
immediately preceded the otherworldly Sextant and commercial
breakthrough Headhunters, both on Columbia):
"I've played with some fantstic soloists... but there's a thing
that I think is more important than solos. I think music is
supposed to make you high, to give you an experience so that you
can transport yourself from wherever you are and that whole
physical contact with the world so that you can gain a little
more consciousness - inner consciousness. I think it would
be impossible for most of my early music to do that, just from
the very nature of the material; but my new music is set up to
do just that. It's set up to make you high."
"The new avant-garde has finally found a direction, but it's
like a spectrum. It's not one direction; there are many directions
and they all have to do with giving people an experience rather
than just giving them a bunch of notes."
"One thing became apparent to me last year. I'd go to friends'
homes and see my albums on the shelves with lots of other peoples'
records, and they'd play all the others except mine. My intention
at the time was to play music to be listened to with undivided
attention; but how many people have time to approach music
that way? Before, I was so interested in spirituality that I
didn't recognize that a person puts on a record with his hands
and not his spirit. [The emphasis shifted from] heavy musical
trips that try to expand people's minds [to] making people feel
like getting up in the morning and going to work."
"I'm not knocking the other thing. I'm just saying that there are
several ways to look at music."
Comments to follow later.
You'd think Warner Brothers could've included full-page, and color,
reproductions of the original album covers in the liner notes,
since the cover is a picture of Herbie. But nooooo.
8:57 PM
History of
House link stolen from Tom. I don't like house but I don't like
being ignorant either.
1:30 AM
Everyone else is link to this
so I thought I might as well. I started reading it before, passed it
up as Yet Another MP3 Overview, but on reading the rest tonight I
found it was actually very, very thorough.
And once again, the whole issue makes me feel patriotic and concerned
about (vaguely) political / socioeconomic issues. How about that. Me.
August 20, 2000
2:32 PM
The other day the chant to Sun Ra's "Space is the Place" popped into
my head, unbidden. So I listened to it today. When I listened to the
second track of the album, "Images," I got the very strange impression
that the bass (electric, vs. an otherwise all-acoustic band) was
playing alongside the band, rather than beneath it,
as is customary.
12:41 PM
Mike wrote in to remind
me, regarding the Monk article below, that a lot of this brain-separation
stuff is bunk anyway. Certainly there is a separation, but
the author seems to have given it a little more importance than he
should scientifically be able to. Unfortunately (?), I never bought
a book for my freshman psych class. So, yes, bunk. I guess they hand
out degrees for anything these days.
12:35 PM
Tom wrote short sentences about a band. The name of this band is
Talking Heads.
Tom did a good job.
2:59 AM
I lied before, or at least didn't know any better, when I said I
owned no Bud Powell; I own at least one track (there may be more
hiding on other albums, like my Diz or Bird stuff) including his
playing, his guest appearance on "I'll Remember April" from Mingus'
live Mingus at Antibes.
Mingus was never one to kowtow for kowtowing's sake, so his respect
for Powell is obvious here; after the head Powell takes the first
solo, and it's a long one (can't be bothered to count the choruses
right now, but it's around 3 or 4 minutes of the 13 minute running
time) - much longer than Ted Curson's trumpet blow, and maybe
each of the saxes (though Dolphy and Ervin trade fours later).
The liner notes have this to say (isn't it convenient that archival
releases have discursive liner notes?):
The pianist is in a deliberate mood here, phrasing in a blocked-out,
infinitesimally behind-the-beat manner that brings the Powell-Monk
relationship to mind. His style is leaner and less like a steamroller
than in his earlier years, and there are a few occasions when his
articulation is not all it could be, but these are the kind of
quibbles only a pedant would take seriously. The man was playing
music of a very high order.
Hearing this, comments linking Keith Jarrett's style to Bud Powell's
suddenly become clear to me. In fact, they seem more apt than those
which tie Jarrett to Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner, though I've only
heard so much of Jarrett's work. Notably what I've heard has been
some of his most melodic stuff. Powell's solo on "April" seems
effortlessly melodic, just like Jarrett's on his live "standards
trio" album, Tokyo '96. He even "sings" like Jarrett (or
is that vice versa?)!
And as a side note: though Dolphy gets more and more out later on,
he's never all that far out and for the most part his playing is
brilliantly lyrical and inside. That and the fact that this is
a fairly plain-vanilla, hard-driving bop number should dissuade
any doubters from thinking Dolphy was just some atonal weirdo.
12:29 PM
I regard this
paper, "Studies in Madness," with suspicion. It's by a psychologist
and amateur musician, and attempts to contrast the music of Monk
and Bud Powell by way of their mental illnesses. I'm not very
convinced by the argument because it relies on some half-assed
assumptions: first, that Monk even suffered from mental illness (he
may have been hospitalized for depression once, and he was certainly
eccentric, but one of the institutionalizations referred to in the
paper is characterized in the Time magazine cover
story as simply accidental and uneventful).
More suspect, though, are the musical assessments. The author characterizes
Powell's music as more logical, temporal, and linear, and Monk's as
more global, spatial, and nonlinear. Part of the assessment of Powell's
music as logical seems to come from its obvious relationship to
the European classical tradition, which the author notes and seems to
use as justification. But he fails to discuss how, despite its
difficulty and oddity to people steeped in the European tradition,
Monk's music is certainly no less logical than Powell's - it's
different, that's all. Likewise, because Powell's playing is
fluid and smooth, it gets the "temporal" label, slighting Monk's
music, which as any serious Monk listener will tell you, swings like
a mother ("Monk has the best time of all," quoth Charles Mingus).
Again, it's different, but not lacking in deep temporal
values. (As for "spatial," I would tend to agree, but I haven't heard
much Powell and he probably deserves a fairer share on that one, if
the rest of the author's assessments are any indication.)
The author uses these distinctions to paint a picture of Monk as
right-brained, and Powell as left-brained, backing this up by
tying it to their physical playing styles. Monk's playing
has a heavy stride component to it, so he often plays with his
left hand (operated, because of the crossover, by the right brain)
more than his right; Powell, on the other hand, is given to chordal
accompaniment with his left while his right performs all the dazzling
melodic improvisation (controlled by his left brain). This, too,
seems vaguely suspect. Powell was by far the more immediate influence
on the generation of bop pianists that grew after the bop pioneers'
developments. So by the author's reasoning, scores of pianists
should be, to some significant degree, more left-brained than
right-brained, right? Just seems too pat.
The sum effect of all these half-assed claims is that they let the
author tie the musical styles, playing styles, and behaviors of
the two pianists together in one nice little bundle. But to what
effect? I don't feel my understanding of these men's music, or of
creativity in general, has been improved in any way.