Ruminate

Album of the Moment

The Beacon and Celebrity Trio Recordings
Elmo Hope
Recorded in 1959 and 1961

Solid, swinging bop that is accessible but stands up to scrutiny. Hope reminds me a bit of Wynton Kelly with some of the angular, hard attack of Monk. It’s a mystery why Hope remains obscure while Kelly, Red Garland, and others have achieved some level of name recognition. The tracks here have good, if not great sound (I don’t own the Blue Note sessions which have other versions of these tracks so can’t comment on the relative sound quality).

Track Listing

1. Chips
2. Happy Hour (Delving)
3. Mo’s Bluff
4. Maybe So
5. Mo Is On
6. Crazy (the Race for Space)
7. Hot Sauce
8. When the Groove is Low
9. De-Dah
10. Abdula
11. Freffie
12. Stars Over Marakesh

Personnel

• Elmo Hope (piano)
• Paul Chambers (bass)
• Philly Joe Jones (drums)
• Edward Warren (bass, tracks 3-6)
• Granville Hogan (drums, tracks 3-6)

Links

• The Elmo Hope Discography
• The Legend of St. Elmo
• AllMusic Entry

LOTR as it would be written by more authors than you can shake a stick at. Oh, and in the style of television shows. And music (I like the U2 version “One Ring”). And Broadway. Quality varies, but what do you expect?

Eileen, Achilles, and her lazy, lovely ass ask about Blues for Bird by Martin Gray. A serendipitous question, as I went to sleep last night listening to Bird’s Complete Savoy Live Performances. There many good jazz musicians and some who are great. But there are only a handful who truly changed the nature of the music, assimilating what came before and not only doing something new, but laying down the framework for generations of musicans to come– the stellar artists, the “jazz planets.” I’m thinking of people like Satchmo with the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, the short life of Bird, Coltrane…

I have mixed feelings about Martin Gray’s book. As a Charlie Parker biography, it is rootin’-tootin’ good. The other two great Parker books are Carl Woideck’s His Music and His Life (accurate) and Bird Lives! by Ross Russell (sensationalistic, personalized, and extremely interesting, particularly when it comes to marginal figures like Dean Benedetti).

As poetry, the book fails on a number of levels. I am ambivalent–even a little negative–about long poems, so I naturally found it hard going. I kept wondering: why isn’t this just composed as prose? What is the form adding to the content? As a match for the subject matter, poetry can be seen as a technique to try to capture some of the more mysterious and subtle aspects of jazz. Writing in an engaging manner about music, like writing about visual art, is hard work. But in this particular case I didn’t find the content demandig the form, or much writing that took on a different character because it was approached as verse.

It will be interesting to see what others think. The blurbs for the book are mostly musicians and jazz fans, for whom the biographical aspects are the most important. I’d like to hear what more poets and readers have to say…

Perhaps I’m not hip enough, but I really don’t get the whole social network thing (ala Friendster or Orkut, the new Google site). It just looks like a variation on your standard singles site with the benefit that you can talk to all of your erstwhile partner’s friends if things go sour. In this setting, “friend” appears to be a code word for possible partner in a romantic relationship.

I don’t even want to know my own friends most of the time, much less their friends too! Introvertster might be more my style…

Chris Murray posts the syllabus for her senior seminar in poetry writing. A useful booklist therein.

I should also note that while I was away from blogging for a while, I missed a chance to watch real-time as Michaela subjected some guy named Aaron Haspel to a good old-fashioned literary ass-whipping, and I don’t mean the good kind. At issue was Aaron’s somewhat funny (from this distance) attempted reading of Ozymandias and Michaela’s approach to poetry. It is instructive to see how he manages to miss two targets completely with just one arrow. Michaela’s last two sentences really say it all.

Now I don’t know Aaron from Aadam, and most of his writing seems well thought out, but I can’t help but wonder if he really believes what he is saying. So many critics ride their critical hobby horse until they lose sight of the objects they purport to be interested in. I know how satisfying that ride can be, and how well molded our ass becomes to those indentations in the saddle after we do it long enough…

Perhaps what made me ultimately give up on criticism as an enterprise was that I never believed what I was saying even as I was making complex, sometimes subtle, and even occasionally good arguments about a work. Deep inside I still believed that ultimately I was just playing the part of the music theorist trying to chart and explain jazz when what is most important about it is contingent and springs from too many sources to be contained, much less satisfactorily explained, using such infantile tools.

Well, that and the fact that I would rather be the one playing a solo that makes a listener cry– or be the listener crying– than the square in the suit trying to talk himself into tears… or worse, convince himself he’s better off without them.

Michaela refers to a piece about the Tractatus as an elaborate joke. And it is in the same way that Daoist principles about knowledge (I’m already reaching an ironic distance just by saying that) and Zen koans are jokes. Godel made perhaps the funniest joke of it all, but even your average Roshi gets there a hell of a lot quicker with nothing but a ruler and a knowing glance.

I still can’t figure out how anyone could go to the polls and actually pull the trigger and lay down a vote for John Kerry. He’s the kind of candidate that appears every election that people should think about voting for (because he has a meaningless campaign to which one can ascribe just about anything they wish, and a bland personality, same) but then realize that if they are going to really do it, they ought to just forget about voting, rent a movie, and go home instead.

Kerry is the pleasant girl (or guy) you find yourself looking at and wondering why they never get asked out on a date… but whom you would never ask out yourself. He’s like the rote, boring, colorless New England Patriots… but he’s not a winner. I just don’t get it.

On another note. A.O. Scott writes in Slate:

Somehow, though, the nexus of movies and politics that Hoberman is writing about seems not to have survived: His habit of linking movies and movie genres to presidents (so that we can talk about a “Kennedy Western,” an “LBJ Western,” a “Nixon Western,” and even a “McGovern Western”) wouldn’t quite work in the present.

Maybe so. But if they don’t represent a genre, there is still the possibility of finding the kind of movie that represents them. Surely Reagan would a Western… one of those anomalous, not particularly good (but surprisingly popular) Kevin Costner vehicles that wins an Oscar which no Academy member will admit to having supported later on. But what would a Bush (either one) or Clinton movie be?

On The Simpsons, when Sideshow Bob is in jail, his prisoner number is: 24601.

Significance? This is also Jean Valjean’s number in Les Miserables…

Many more fun examples of less obvious humor and references from one of the few television shows still worth watching at Subtly Simpsons.

Incidentally, Principal Skinner’s number when imprisoned in Vietnam was also 24601…

Henry writes: “The idea that the writer - like the jazz musician - intuitively - already “gets” it; & art is an effort to escape that knowledge.”

Then: “the artist may intuit something. . . but it’s as much moving toward as escape from.”

The second captures somewhat my initial thought upon reading the first (I always read weblogs chronologically from where I left off, even though they are almost all arranged in reverse).

The artist gets it in the sense that there is a tickle in their mind, they know they are onto something, they apprehend the shrouded form. The art is the attempt to find out what it is they’ve got. In that moving toward we hope for some escape from the uncertainty. Is it just an iceberg or an undiscovered country? Or a corpse that dwarfs us (and our ambition)?