I confess to worshipping the dead...
Without actually worshipping anyone...
i will be forever devoted to louis armstrong, but if you open your mind ears a little more and let go of silly dogmas a bit, you will find that his, and all the other classic greats', legacy of
revolutionary innovation is alive and KICKING, in the 21st century.
Oh, it's a tough choice...neo-con Trad Improv reactionary fascist radicalism...can't I just sit on the fence? Fact is I take neither side in this war. Marsalis can sometimes make a fine noise to my ears....and the pure Noiseists can do what the hell they like. I'm all for artistic freedom...
i can not make out what you are delineating as the "choices" with your garbled string of words. are you placing fascism on the side of the free-improvisers??? if you are you are out of your mind. for the free players never ever became outraged at anyone else doing their thing, and used authority to marginalize them.
the free players are the marginalized ones, just like their ancestors who invented Jazz Music 100 years ago. and the Marsalis camp of fascist creeps are just like the music establishment in the beginning of the 20th century, angrily shouting this or that "is not music", and frantically putting their fearful labels on everything.
and it sounds to me like you are for sure taking a side in this war - you pay verbiage to "artistic freedom", but it's nothing more than sound bytes, for you clearly sympathize with the neo-cons.
I once watched performance which involved taking a trombone apart and blowing rasberrieis through various parts...I tell you, it was the most excruciatingly funny thing I'd ever seen and along with my friend had to hold my sides whilst creased up in agony to stop laughing out loud in an auditorium contaning about twenty people. The man involved in this case obviously didn't have my sense of humour.
"i once watched this group of 4 or 5 negroes playing saxophones and trumpets in very very WRONG manners. they were jumping around the stage, hollering and hooting and making all kinds of vulgar ungodly noises, acting like a buncha god damned chimpanzees. I tell you, me and my friend had to run for the exit but no one else seemed to be bothered by that disgusting garbage. what the hell is wrong with this world?!"
As you probably know, Miles made a funny quip about Dolphy way back...then went on to make his own perverse form of 'Jazz' which many wouldn't have recognised as 'Jazz'.
whatever made miles say what he did during the blind test that day, it can not be taken as an authoritative remark which describes his assessment of Dolphy as an artist. no, not from someone who deeply admired Stockhousen and Xenakis.
Mind you, I now think he had a point when he advised JC to take the damn horn out of his mouth...but that's another matter....perhaps.
you are getting the context wrong, i hope not willfully. Trane at the time was on a stream of consciousness thing, and had trouble resolving his spontaneous compositions:
John Coltrane asked Miles Davis's advice on how to end a solo because Trane was having difficulty finding a place to end. Miles answered in his raspy whisper, "Take the horn out your mouth."
I don't think the artists involved here are true descendents of anything but their particular strand of sound-making...
you are wrong.
much less Jazz or even Free Jazz as in Ornette? Ornette as Dr Frankenstein? There's a case to be made, I'm sure...but even his 'freedom' of 50 yrs ago sounds...'musical' compared to pure Improv, doesn't it?.
you are stereotyping an entire field of new jazz music even more diverse in practice, process, sound and aesthetic than traditional jazz, and discounting countless free improvisers who are very much "musical", in the way you mean.
and the more out there stuff sounds "unmusical" to your calcified sensibilities, and those of people like you, only. don't take your closed-mindedness or senility for law, and think everyone shares, or should share, your myopic view of what is or isn't "jazz".
What would Mingus, who said jazz was the sound of surprise, make of these noodlers? My guess is he wouldn't rate them much...
you make yoursef sound silly man. if i were you i would not have used that righteous quote from Mingus to illustrate the falsehoods which come out of your mouth.
