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Vinyl Asylum Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ. |
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In Reply to: RE: Cool LPs you have posted... posted by peteSF on August 21, 2016 at 15:38:52:
I once had the pleasure of hearing Frank Wright with Dewey Redman, Kidd Jordan, Sonny Murray, and Elton Heron in a tribute to Albert Ayler in 1989, and this show really opened my ears to the more out free jazz. They were the opening act for Ornette and Prime Time-I was already a huge Ornette fan, although not so much of Prime Time.
I am a child of the 60's (b. 1959) and I was faculty brat in Lancaster, Pa with two older siblings. My father was a violinist, and my parents were huge chamber music fans. We also had all the requisite left-liberal music of the time: from Tom Lehrer to Joan Baez and Simon and Garfunkel. Of course I was a big Beatles fan and then got into the Stones, and we were pip squeak identifiers with the counter culture. As a teenager, I listened to WMMR in Philadelphia, a leading free form FM station of the time, and I started to get into British folk rock, and the radio even gave us our first taste of punk attitude via Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and even the Modern Lovers. I arrived in college at the beginning of the punk explosion (1977) and the hip Manhattan kids turned me onto that scene. At the same time, my interest in older rocknroll forms and classic r' and b' deepened, and I after graduation I was a research assistant for a book on the structural basis of rocknroll by one of my professors.
I moved to New Orleans in 1984 for the music, and got to hear most of the 60's r'and b' greats from here on a regular basis. And the brass band music revival was just starting, with the Dirty Dozen updating the style with bebop, funk, and street beats. The Wynton neo-con jazz revival had a big influence here, so I was exposed to a lot of straight ahead jazz, which helped me to learn to listen. My musician friends were more eclectic in their taste, and they turned me on to more expressive forms of jazz. My first real enthusiasm were blues based: Monk, Mingus, and especially Ornette, who of course has the reputation of being difficult but to me his music sounded uncontrived (unlike much "modern jazz) and direct. Of course New Orleans is associated (now more than ever, "thanks" to the unfortunate alignment of the musical institutions with the tourist industry,) with trad jazz and swing, but all through the 90's Latin, funk, klezmer and brass bands were what played on Frenchmen Street, providing space for improvisers to play within social and popular music forms. While free jazz has always been a very underground thing here, I have had the opportunity to hear Kidd Jordan (81 year old free jazz icon and long time educator) over a hundred times, and learning how to listen to him opened my ears to all sorts of adventuresome music. And over the past 20 years we have had a near endless parade of American and European free jazz and improv icons visit and collaborate with local musicians.
Looking back on my musical history, I realize is what I value most is expressiveness in the service of community (as opposed to solipsism.) A musician friend once said I like my rocknroll stupid and my jazz smart, but in fact when formal experimentation becomes an end unto itself I tune out, whether it is prog rock or "progressive" jazz. Some musicians can say it all with one note (I once heard B.B. King kill'em with just the first note of "The Thirll is Gone,) others (Coltrane, perhaps) need all the notes and then some, but in the end it is the communication that counts--otherwise, in the words of the great James Brown, "you're just talkin' loud/and sayin' nothin'."
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- RE: Cool LPs you have posted... - belyin 23:19:15 08/21/16 (0)
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