From: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org (fegmaniax-digest) To: fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Subject: fegmaniax-digest V10 #30 Reply-To: fegmaniax@smoe.org Sender: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk fegmaniax-digest Saturday, February 3 2001 Volume 10 : Number 030 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: robyn radio [GSS ] Re: oh...my...god and all that jazz [GSS ] Re: an awfully articulate opinion, found elsewhere [Capuchin ] Re: oh...my...god and all that jazz [dmw ] Re: robyn radio [hbrandt ] all that jazz [grutness@surf4nix.com] my wood for the "Jazz" fire ;) [Ben ] Jazz: TV or not TV [hbrandt ] Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's Chachi ["Asshole Motherfucker" ] World's greatest wift ["Irish Airman" ] The Prawn Lies Down on Broadway [mad ] Re: Jazz: TV or not TV [Eb ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 14:43:03 -0500 (CDT) From: GSS Subject: Re: robyn radio On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, Bayard wrote: > i just meant, FM broadcasts only go so high anyway (16khz?). So cranking > the quality won't get you much. Not that I'm complaining. it sounds > fantastic, and I have a T3. But that was British FM, which runs much higher than North American FM broadcasts. ;-] gss ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 14:48:51 -0500 (CDT) From: GSS Subject: Re: oh...my...god and all that jazz On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, Eb wrote: > Well, Burns did explicitly discuss Kind of Blue. It was even one of the > choice few album covers flashed onscreen during the series. And wasn't "All > Blues" played as background music, at one point? Possibly, but I recall neither. Thou if he did then he can have my snicker-doodle. gss ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 13:17:31 -0800 (PST) From: Capuchin Subject: Re: an awfully articulate opinion, found elsewhere On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, Eb wrote: > In the 1970's, record companies discovered that their back catalog of > jazz was nothing less than a cash cow, and the modern-day reissue was > born. (It is hard today to realize just how scant was the > availability of older music prior to 1970.) But throughout the decade > the musical world recognized that the great accomplishments of the > 30's, 40's and 50's were "classics", durable works of art that > audiences were still eager to hear. Actually, they were just waiting for the Copyright Act to get rewritten in the 1970s. Old recordings were unreleased because they wanted to make sure that, if those copyrights were lost, the only publicly accessible copies of those works would be low quality and therefore be unable to compete with high quality recordings of new music. As soon as we got rid of that pesky bit about "authors" and "artists" in the Copyright Act and narrowed it all down to "copyright holders", they were safe to re-issue back catalog. One note. J. - -- _______________________________________________ Capuchin capuchin@bitmine.net Jeme A Brelin ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2001 14:14:39 -0700 From: hbrandt Subject: Re: oh...my...god and all that jazz Eb wrote: > how many stories did Burns really > follow "to the finish line"? > Right, just a few. > >> And certainly, I would've rather he had > >> followed the story of *jazz* to the finish line > >up to the present day, with a substantial depth of > discussion. It was only 18 hours long! It would've had to been edited by the crew at MTV to contain everything and to please everybody (and then it would've really sucked.) /hal ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 16:25:30 -0500 (EST) From: dmw Subject: Re: oh...my...god and all that jazz On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, Eb wrote: > You know what I meant: up to the present day, with a substantial depth of > discussion. "Present day," really? I think i'd argue that at least a little bit of historical perspective is useful, although i think "standing the test of time" is probably mostly a consequence of commercial availability. If it had been me, I doubt I would have included much that was more recent than, i dunno, 10 years? Speaking of which, i'm a bit outta touch with what *is* good in current jazz, especially as new voices go. not so long ago Jane Ira Bloom, Kenny Garrett, Cyrus Chestnut, a few others, seemed to be coming into their own as composing voices... anyone want to recommend an up & coming voice or two? nothing "smooth" or "lite," now... - -- d. np jejune _r.i.p._ - - oh no, you've just read mail from doug = dmw@radix.net - get yr pathos - - www.pathetic-caverns.com -- books, flicks, tunes, etc. = reviews - - www.fecklessbeast.com -- angst, guilt, fear, betrayal! = guitar pop ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2001 14:42:39 -0700 From: hbrandt Subject: Re: robyn radio Bayard wrote: > >Robyn radio: > > http://www.bitmine.net/~bayard/robyn/ > Uncorrected Personality Traits, solo acoustic accompanied version That was a treat! After years of hearing it a capella, it was most amusing to hear it rearranged (a bit) for solo acoustic. Thanks! /hal ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 11:30:59 +1300 From: grutness@surf4nix.com Subject: all that jazz >Other artists who achieved hit singles on the pop charts: George >Benson, Joni Mitchell (with an old Lambert Hendricks and Ross song!), >Chuck Mangione (a reminder that Mangione still is the best selling >trumpeter of all former Blakey sidemen), Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones, >Carlos Ward (The B.T. Express), Manhattan Transfer (with the Joe >Zawinul-Jon Hendricks "Birdland"), Roy Ayers, The Crusaders (with the >sensational Randy Crawford). Add the soul charts and the list grows >rapidly longer: Donald Byrd, Stanley Turrentine, Grover Washington, >Jr., David Newman, Webster Lewis, Lonnie Liston Smith, Cedar Walton. >Even Milt Jackson hit the soul charts with Cedar's "I'm Not So Sure". and that's not counting the influence that Jazz had on many other rock musicians (from Sting to Joe Jackson to Pete Townshend to Van Morrison). James (who is very pleased to see the recent re-release at budget prices of many classic Jazz albums - Blakey, 'Trane, Parker, Davis,...) James Dignan, Dunedin, New Zealand. =-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= -=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.- .-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=- You talk to me as if from a distance -.-=-.- And I reply with impressions chosen from another time =-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-. (Brian Eno - "By this River") ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2001 19:17:38 -0500 From: Ben Subject: my wood for the "Jazz" fire ;) > Right, just a few. And no *way* did he follow Miles to the finish line. > Heck, he didn't even make it to "On the Corner." Yeah he really wrote off Electric Miles in a big way. One could see this coming when the narrator said that Bitches Brew was a big seller and that it was released in 1970. OK only 1 year off but since it is such a huge album you'd think it would be difficult to miss that. But then it immediately went into slamming the music he made between Bitches Brew and his 1975 retirement, essentially portraying Miles as a sellout who only wanted to gain the rock audience. The only mention you get of the actual music is a narrator commenting that Miles Davis' groups of the time were a big mess and he was "playing tennis without a net". Fade to black - jazz is dead (nice job Miles, you jerk). If Burns was more responsible of a filmaker he would have included more than one opinion on this, and a lot of the other music covered. Even if he thought a style or musician was total crap, when that style is held in high regard by many, he owed it to the audience (who may know nothing about jazz and have no opinion) to show both sides of the story. It is simply criminal to leave an uneducated audience with the impression that there is only one accepted opinion about a topic which has a large amount of supporters and a large amount of detractors. Of course Burns relied mainly on W. Marsalis, who is very knowledgeable, a great musician, and absoultely *infamous* in his traditionalist views. It's like asking Eb to write the liners for an Alice Cooper box set - surely it would be an articulate and convincing bloodbath. ;-) In asking why did Burns use Marsalis so much I think he did it because Marsalis is a very convincing speaker when he is talking about his favorite musician (Armstrong) and his love of the music is infectous. But one is left with the feeling that Burns was more attracted to the kind of reverance Marsalis has for the music and conveys so well, than to the music itself. In jazz there is a lot of hero-worship and it appears that is the main reason he chose it as his topic. The makers of the series have mentioned two goals that they hoped it would fulfil. One was to look at the issue of race in the 20th Century through the eyes of jazz. I think most people would agree that the years of 1950-1970 were the height of the civil rights movement and and if you were going to make a film about the history of civil rights, these years would feature prominently. Yet as it has been pointed out already, in "Jazz" we got what must already be the most infamous artistic short-change ever, the final " last 40-Years" episode. How someone who is attempting to address this issue could relegate such a tiny percentage to the 1960's boggles the mind! Anyone with a grade-school education... well you get the idea.;) Another goal they had was to hopefully turn on a new generation to jazz. Since rock music is the dominant style today, it is safe to say many young people get into jazz through rock, I know I did and everyone I know who likes jazz did as well. The artists we got into first were those who were modern in the 50's, 60's and 70's. Ironically, though the music of 60's Coltrane and Miles is more "out-there" than that of Armstrong or Ellington, it actually is a lot more familiar to the modern ear. It is through this later jazz that we discover the earlier jazz. Yet the series dwelled to a sometimes comic extent on early jazz. If your typical rock fan is scanning through the dial, what footage is more likely to make him/her stop and watch, Armstrong singing "Dinah" or Coltrane burning through "Impressions"??? Since Burns used that "Dinah" clip about every 5 minutes he must think that will be the music to attract a new audience with. Some folks are asking "Why is everyone so angry about this series?" and it's easy to answer. Jazz fans maybe more than any others, want to see it presented in the very best way to the "outside" world, because it is such a commercially unsucessful art form and needs all the help it can get. When series such as this attracts a huge media coverage and subsequently a large audience, we want them to be watching a product that is no less than "A" quality. It is like with an artist like Robyn, when you present him to a possible new fan, you will give them one of his best albums, not one of his worst. Yet with Jazz we were given an artistic Titanic - massive, famous, disasterous!!! If one good thing comes out of the huge negative backlash against this series, it will be that hopefully in the future, documentary filmakers we think twice about jumping into the deep end when they have no idea how to swim. Especially when their subject is something like jazz music, which is underappreciated and deserves the best effort to show its greatness. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2001 18:32:06 -0700 From: hbrandt Subject: Jazz: TV or not TV The mistake that jazz purists made about "Jazz" is in hoping that a TV show would (or could) "rescue" their favorite struggling and/or unrecognized artists from their relative obscurity and let them (deservedly?) get their just rewards. It doesn't happen that way. Analogy: I read "alternative" comicbooks. I didn't expect the recent X-Men movie to get folks into comicbook specialty stores to investigate the more obscure titles I read. I also wouldn't expect any TV show/documentary that would conceivably be made about comics (especially if it aired on PBS, not the Sundance Channel) to do anything more than talk about Superman, Batman, Spiderman and yes, the X-Men. /hal ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 02:04:40 -0800 From: "Asshole Motherfucker" Subject: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's Chachi i think it'd include robyn. the man's put out more than 20 albums in a quarter-century career. he's loved by critics and (especially) his peers. he's dabbled with some (albeit very) minor chart success. he's opened for r.e.m. in arenas. he's played at mountain stage, and on 120 Minutes, letterman, conan, and dennis miller. one would expect that he's a cinch for at least a hall of fame *nomination* (though if it took the velvets three ballots to get in...). this Sopranos dvd box is pretty awesome. but i don't recall the show having been letterboxed when it's played on HBO? ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 05:20:56 -0500 (EST) From: Terrence Marks Subject: Re: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's Chachi On Sat, 3 Feb 2001, Asshole Motherfucker wrote: > Hitchcock or Neutral Milk Hotel and no one would really expect it to, right?> > > i think it'd include robyn. the man's put out more than 20 albums in a > quarter-century career. he's loved by critics and (especially) his peers. > he's dabbled with some (albeit very) minor chart success. he's opened for > r.e.m. in arenas. he's played at mountain stage, and on 120 Minutes, > letterman, conan, and dennis miller. Well, yeah, but there's hundreds of other rock bands that've done significantly better in terms of everything but longevity. Besides, an 18-hour history of rock would devote nine hours to the Beatles and an additional two to John Lennon. I think we'd be lucky if it mentioned The Kinks. Terrence Marks Unlike Minerva (a comic strip) http://www.unlikeminerva.com HCF (another comic strip) http://www.mpog.com/hcf normal@grove.ufl.edu ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2001 08:42:52 -0600 From: Dolph Chaney Subject: Re: oh...my...god and all that jazz Doug asked: >"Present day," really? I think i'd argue that at least a little bit of >historical perspective is useful, although i think "standing the test of >time" is probably mostly a consequence of commercial availability. If it >had been me, I doubt I would have included much that was more recent than, >i dunno, 10 years? Were it me, I think I would make an effort to point out that jazz is still going by having at least one clip of someone within the past decade. See below for my nomination... >Speaking of which, i'm a bit outta touch with what *is* good in current >jazz, especially as new voices go. not so long ago Jane Ira Bloom, Kenny >Garrett, Cyrus Chestnut, a few others, seemed to be coming into their own >as composing voices... anyone want to recommend an up & coming voice or >two? nothing "smooth" or "lite," now... Get thee, my friend, to saxophonist Joshua Redman. Here we have someone young, charismatic, cerebral, with excellent chops and ideas to match, equally committed to good composition and good improvisation... almost *gasp* Marsalian!!! ;-) Since it's the album I started with, I recommend getting _MoodSwing_ first. In my head, if anybody is going to be thought of as a 90s-oughts jazz leader, it's going to be Redman. dolph ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2001 10:37:58 -0500 From: "Irish Airman" Subject: World's greatest wift Dignan worte about wifty: >the only time I've ever come across the word (and then spelt 'wifty') >it >was to describe the fey attitude and habits of the crystal polishing, >horoscope casting 'nouveau witch', i.e., New Age, set I think of it as airhead in general, as in the wind wifting(if it aint a word it sure should be)thru that person's brain. Also--about Dylan: >yeah - if you must be, erm, eccentric, be interesting about it (I'm >sure >that's the main reason that Jack Nicholson keeps getting onto awards >shows...) Well-I just found Dylan authentically beautiful-hidious(and proud of it)admidst all the artificially-enhanced pulchritude. Sorta as if you took Abe Lincoln and threw him into a group pic of today's politicians. Eb opined of "Jazz": >However, if "Jazz" serves to sink Burns' next application for a NEA >grant, >I guess it all will have been worth it.... And here I thought he would just be going for a life-time long MacArthur Foundation genius award...(thou I would nominate Ben for finding the Jazz-parody post.) And Thorton added: >No Wes Montgomery. Arggg. I have to admit I missed most of the series. Now Burns did at least have stuff on Django, right? Glad to hear Billie got her due. And Im hidiously old-fashioned about greatest rock n roll song: "Satisfaction"(thou I sorta prefer the angst and irony of "Get Off My Cloud.") )Not because the baby-boomers invented rock n roll(no, thats Chuck Berry who "should" get it for "Johnny B Goode"--but there are no "shoulds" in rock n roll)but because we're the 500 pund gorrila.) Either that or "She Loves You" or yes, the the Beatles cover of "Twist and Shout" Why? Because of Occam's Razor rock n roll style--Keep It Simple, Stupid(which is, of course, where Kiss got its name--forget the Satan crap;-). Or if you really want to get fancy and all concepty-- 'Like a Rolling Stone" beats out "Sympathy for the Devil. Why? Cause its realer. And GGS, to whom I still---arrrgghh--owe a tape(wifty--as in K's brain) had the wisdom to offer: >the world's greatest rock-n-roll song has just become, hazy jane ii. Well-perhaps the greatest folk-jazz-rock-funky-beautiful-sensual-true song. Or would that be Townsend's "Shout"?;-) This post has been brought to you in memeory of Skunkbucket LeFunke, inventor of the Internot. K _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2001 11:42:44 -0500 From: mad Subject: The Prawn Lies Down on Broadway Any word on when the Soft Boys NY shows go on sale? Will there be an influx of fegsters? If so, I've got plenty of space - hint hint Randi -O Sister where art thou? For the proggies on the list (all 5 of them), tickets for Nearfest go on sale Feb. 17 - http://www.nearfest.com/nearfest/ S.Mary np - Ultravox Ha! Ha! Ha! ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 13:58:09 -0700 From: Eb Subject: Re: Jazz: TV or not TV >The mistake that jazz purists made about "Jazz" is in hoping that a TV >show would (or could) "rescue" their favorite struggling and/or >unrecognized artists from their relative obscurity and let them >(deservedly?) get their just rewards. Mmm...no, that's really not it at all. It's an issue of traditional vs. new school, not popular vs. unpopular. Many of the later fusion acts, etc. which were ignored by "Jazz" sold quite well, and have no need to be "rescued." Charles Mingus was badly shortchanged, yet he's one of jazz's best-known names. The bias of "Jazz" was ideological, not populist. Eb ------------------------------ End of fegmaniax-digest V10 #30 *******************************