Jazz for Jack Law

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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Corpsey said:
I'm not as crazy about it after track 12 - not sure if this is just a pavlovian response by now or if it goes somewhere that I don't like as much as the first 12 tracks?

I'm listening to the horace silver track you just added now and that fits the initial 12 tracks vibe more maybe?
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There's a few threads which involve my relationship with jazz, one created by the reverend @sadmanbarty (iirc) and hardcore jazz from Riyadh, which to be fair might be way too free/noisy/dissonant for you. But there's a lot of muscle and bone and sinews to the best jazz, unlike rock and roll which wants to get to similar ecstatic heights by putting in the minimum amount of effort - which is fair enough, but inevitably results in diminishing returns.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Benny B said:
One thing thats really remarkable about Miles later stuff is that while its certainly 'out there' and experimental and more loosely/uncoventionally structured, its not generally (to my ears at least) 'atonal' and cacophonous either - indeed I think he was pretty contemptuous of free jazz, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler etc. He found a 'third way' of sorts in the mid to late 60s into the 70s. In A Silent Way is actually really pretty, and then you've got all the rhythmic funk rock influence and studio trickery in stuff like Bitches Brew and On the Corner that more modern ears can relate to.
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He disliked free jazz for sure from his biography but I'd say for him it seemed to be more about hype, he had a bone to pick with Ornette because he wouldn't respect the instrumental craft of the violin or the trumpet. But I mean Miles is not a supreme trumpet player when compared to the likes of Clifford brown (in fact as a soloist he's kind of hotel bar cheesy) but Clifford could play amazingly ruff yet still retain serious melodic content. It's precisely Miles as a band leader that's fantastic, that cocaine going round his brain really took him into crazy psychodelic realms, and I'd wager, that if he was a master trumpetter he wouldn't have been able to go out there, cos he'd just overwhelm the band. So there is a democratising impulse there, in a way proving that sometimes lack of skill can be the most progressive thing in music, rather than disavowing those skills per se.

Now, what Ornette did a few years later was hip, and I told him so. But what they were doing back in the beginning was just being spontaneous in their playing, playing "free form," bouncing off what each other was doing. That's cool, but it had been done before, only they were doing it with no kind of form or structure and that's the thing that was important about what they did, not their playing.
I think Cecil Taylor came on the scene around the same time that Ornette did, maybe a little later. He was doing on piano what Ornette and Don were doing with two horns. I felt the same way about him that I felt about them. He was classically trained and could play the piano technically, but I just didn't like his approach. It was just a lot of notes being played for notes' sake; somebody showing off how much technique he had. I remember one night somebody dragged me and Dizzy and Sarah Vaughan up to Birdland to hear Cecil Taylor play. I left after hearing a little bit of what he was doing. I didn't hate him or nothing, and don't hate him today; I just didn't like what he was playing, that's all. (Somebody told me that when Cecil was asked how he liked the way I played, he said, "He plays all right for a millionaire." Now, that's funny; until I heard that I didn't think he had a sense of humor.)
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pattycakes_

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
yeah that's true, miles wasn't the most technical. a fine horn player, but no showman. attitude and vibe above all else. but, like james brown, he had the vision and the taste to constellate the lineups he knew would put the message across in the most direct way - each of the 5 times he evolved the artform.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
pattycakes_ said:
yeah that's true, miles wasn't the most technical. a fine horn player, but no showman. attitude and vibe above all else. but, like james brown, he had the vision and the taste to constellate the lineups he knew would put the message across in the most direct way - each of the 5 times he evolved the artform.
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Yep. Often the best music is made by arseholes and pricks with attitude. Nice-nice goody two shoes people on the whole just don't make anything other than graphic designer music (or repressed indie rock.) One has to see music as life and death, as an alibi for human history, as more important than politics, sex and love, within that moment, almost as a need to plunge people into the abyss of the hellfire so that they can partake in the gnostic communion. And Miles was not the nicest person to be around, but my God. What he squeezed out of those players was nothing but seminal.
 
jenks

jenks

thread death
Got to say the new Floating Points/Pharoah Saunders is just lovely in that In A Silent Way kind of way
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
This, like that Baraka jungle tune, was a song that didn't exist before YouTube, but the algorithm's retconned it being a real song from decade's before.

 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
I have a necessarily slightly blurry memory of listening to this while high as a kite once and the squawky aggressive freak out section actually freaking me out (not unpleasantly):


As far as I understand it weed (or 'grass' or whatever it was called then) was actually a key element in jazz. I don't think jazz has the instant association with weed that reggae does but weed certainly seems to put me in a more receptive place for jazz. (Of course it makes all music sound better, so maybe that's not saying much...)
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I believe I recommended 'greeting to saud' to you when you were on acid once. so I'm taking credit for this.
 
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