You mean I ... wasn't ... a ....whore after all? :greedy:
The Musicians Lounge
- Thread starter elohiym
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You mean I ... wasn't ... a ....whore after all? :greedy:
PureX
Well-known member
A little slutty, maybe, but not a whore. :chuckle:
Well, I feel so much better now. Have you considered a career in therapy?
PureX
Well-known member
That'll be $150. Cash, check, or charge.
How about a "Yankee dime?" :kiss:
When digesting styles I eventually embraced Jazz ... whatever that might be said to be. Most of it was a head, some noodling and a return to the head. Eventually that loses it's allure no matter how good the noodler. Random thoughts are just that, though there is something to be said for being able to improvise in life as well as music. Rock, mercifully, only briefly flirted with this approach (I mean, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida? Heard It Through The Grape Vine? Just stop.) I came to believe that when the folks that were paid to review music couldn't figure out what they were listening to sufficiently to categorize it for the general public they called it "Jazz" out of intellectual laziness.
PureX
Well-known member
I think of jazz the way I think of modern painting. There's lots of different styles within the genre, but they all get a bit tiresome after a while because of the inherent abstractness of it.
Rock is OK, too, but it's basically testosterone driven. And I'm getting old. I prefer music with a roots/folk focus, and lots of 'swing'.
Rock is OK, too, but it's basically testosterone driven. And I'm getting old. I prefer music with a roots/folk focus, and lots of 'swing'.
Jazz is liberating, but the better bits aren't random. I defy anyone to listen to Kind of Blue or A Love Supreme and come away with that impression.
Depends on whether you're into the more textual elements of it or the melodic. It's like literature. Hemmingway or Monk or Hancock here and Faulkner or Davis or Coltrane there.
Was that Lee Sklar on Bass? I thought he was long gone.
I guess (I hope) there is some difference between being different and being abstract. I never could "grok" Ornette Coleman, but musicians I respected thought he was the bomb. In the end I guess we each have our own sense of melody that is either piqued or offended by its own measure.
In the words of Ian Anderson, "Too old to rock and roll and too young to die." So ... here we are, eh?
Ah, a Coltrane aficionado. I am still fascinated by what it is that allows one person to hear something and the next to be deaf to it and I'm not just talking about music. I think the sax was widely regarded as an obscene instrument before "Train" and Jerry Mulligan.
I like how the women who endure such men have a way of putting them in their place. Monk's wife used to call him "Melodious Thunk."
PureX
Well-known member
I think that's a really interesting thing to ponder. I have a fine art background. Degrees from top art schools. And even thought it's focussed on visual arts, I'm sure it colors my appreciation of music, greatly. One of the things I like about jazz is that it's 'smart'. But how am I perceiving that? Do others perceive it as I do? If we talked about it, I think they are, at least to some degree.
I could tell you why a painting or a sculpture is smart, honest, good, bad, or whatever. And I could make an effort at doing so with music, but I doubt I'd hear what a fine musician hears. And I know I couldn't articulate it the way they could.
We do each experience art in our own way. No doubt. And yet I think we do also have a universal experience of it. Because we agree at least as much as we disagree about the experience, when we share it with others.
Very interesting, that.
And a good example, too. When I was young, I loved 'Aqualung', and 'Thick As A Brick'. But I haven't listened to them in many years, and have little desire to, now.
It's not the music that changed, of course, it's me.
PureX
Well-known member
I don't know. I just stumbled on this guy a few weeks ago, and really liked this song. I liked this video because it's obvious that those participants are all pros. And they do make it look and feel so easy.
I have a pretty wide palate where Jazz is concerned, but those are my two favorites, with Davis holding the top spot. I didn't realize it until an upright bass player told me when we were talking shop one night, but Kind of Blue is the most popular and critically regarded jazz album of all time.
Monk is like sushi for the soul.
But he's not for everyone.I have a pretty wide palate where Jazz is concerned, but those are my two favorites, with Davis holding the top spot. I didn't realize it until an upright bass player told me when we were talking shop one night, but Kind of Blue is the most popular and critically regarded jazz album of all time.
Monk is like sushi for the soul.
Whether deliberately or not you are talking about two innovators and I was always attracted to innovation regardless of the genre. The ones that changed the way we thought about music and what it was. Like Beethoven; no one had ever heard anything like that before. The Fifth was like a bolt of lightning out of clear sky. Legend has it one of his students offered a copy of the manuscript for the Fifth to another composer of no small repute and upon reviewing it he said, "It's brilliant ... but, he's mad you know."
Monk was kinda like that. He would be playing and then stop with his hands poised above the keyboard like he was receiving some sort of download and then out came this stuff that was new. He was one of the few that could truly improvise real time ... more or less.
I have a pretty wide palate where Jazz is concerned, but those are my two favorites, with Davis holding the top spot. I didn't realize it until an upright bass player told me when we were talking shop one night, but Kind of Blue is the most popular and critically regarded jazz album of all time.
Davis was to jazz what Zappa was to rock ... namely, the leaders of finishing schools for the better of the aspirants of their particular styles.
It comes with the genius, I think. Doesn't have to be a consideration when you're standing in that pantheon.
Like Mozart.Special, but less accessible than Davis or Coltrane. You needed the primer, the language to really understand what Monk was leaping off of.
In that regard he's especially like the best of the modern painters, who first mastered the form, the convention, then shattered it in a quest for something more.Prolly
I gotta be honest with you ... to me, Mozart was like math.
Special, but less accessible than Davis or Coltrane. You needed the primer, the language to really understand what Monk was leaping off of.
As I suggested to PureX, accessibility is largely an individual matter I think. I mean, who but you would want to marry your wife?
You have my sympathy. Mozart was as close as that form ever came to jazz.
We'll differ here. I think there is what you can get from art as pure experience and what you can get from it as you understand the forms...and you can get a great deal from Frost or Sandburg without having waded into literature deeply, but you'll never understand what Eliot meant to tell you until you do.
I think Monk is like Eliot. Davis is Whitman. Coltrane is Carlos Williams.
Any sighted man with a heterosexual bone in his body, to begin the list.
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