Stray Thoughts of a Stray Mind

by Anthony Medici in Industry News, Musician Reviews, Opinion Posts

Strange Interlude:  no live jazz this weekend. Looking forward to some good shows the next couple of weeks and will report on them of course.  In the meantime, some stray thoughts for your edification.

The recession has hit our friends at Downbeat.  The February 2009 issue has so little content it ought to come with a rebate coupon.  The cover story, “75 Great Guitarists” offers thumbnail (pinky nail?) sketches of, well, 75 guitarists.  This exercise in cloying nostalgia serves no valid purpose except to, once again, exploit the legends of Wes Montgomery and others to cover the lack of serious thinking and reporting that so  depressingly characterizes our mainstream jazz magazines.  Let’s have a good wallow in nostalgia, shall we? 

The issue does have a good interview/profile of saxaphonist David Binney by Ted Panken.  There is some of that “rah rah” house style, though.   There is also a good but terribly short interview with bassist Jack Bruce.  It’s so short you’d have to call it a drive-by interview.  Maybe Jack got bored and called a halt to the proceedings?

The Binney article raised a thought that has recurred to me rather frequently.  Has jazz become more segregated?  An odd and maybe loaded question, perhaps, especially in the Age of Obama, but then again, it needs to be raised particularly because it is the Age of Obama (for which I am fervently thankful).  It does seem to me that the “color line” remains in jazz.  I don’t think this is the result of deliberate prejudice (at least I hope not). I suspect it has more to do with the academicization of jazz, as well as the surge in Europe-American jazz movements, which has, to some extent, pushed blues-based and African American jazz modalities off center stage.  Of course, there are any number of jazz ensembles that are multi-ethnic and multi-racial, but my sense is that the all-white jazz ensemble is a going concern.  As to whether this is good, bad, or of no concern at all, I haven’t made up my mind.  Your thoughts?

Spent some time listening to several Greg Osby albums this weekend.  Osby is something of an odd-man out with one foot in the free jazz camp, the other in the Blue Note mainstream.  Now that Blue Note has dropped Osby, he seems to be a man without a country.  He strikes me as occupying that unenviable position between good and great. Right now I see little prospect of him achieving the latter.   

Listened to Alan Shorter’s “Tes Esat” album on the America Series on French Universal.  Alan lived galled in the shadow of his much more famous younger brother, Wayne. ”Tes Esat” is filled with love and fury, steel and rock, and, to quote Shakespeare, “alarums and excursions.”   But I will say this:  While Wayne wrote several classic albums for Blue Note, he never put out an album better than “Tes Esat.”   I love Amiri Baraka’s description of Alan’s playing on Archie Shepp’s “Four for Trane” as “spikes of brass sound.”  Yes, indeed.   Look at Alan’s photo in the insert booklet for the Shepp CD.  Compare it with almost any picture of Wayne, and you have the classic masks of Tragedy and Comedy.   

The number of “tribute” albums and “legacy” bands has grown appallingly large.  Some peopl ehave made an industry of this; musical pygmies attempting to stand on the shoulders of giants. Miles has been particularly attractive to this breed of unimaginative hacks.  They should take a lesson from Miles:  don’t imitate; look to the New; and don’t repeat yourself.  If they have nothing to say, don’t put out a CD and make it obvious.  This glut of derivative CDs is not harmless; it has the effect of a musical Gresham’s law, wherein the bad drives out the good.

When will Ellery Eskelin, Tim Berne, and William Parker get the general recognition they deserve?

(I just learned of the death of saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman on January 24th.  I saw him last year at Twins Jazz in Washington Dc, and he was still  playing well.  He made a lot of great music.  Thanks David and R.I.P.)