From: saul+@pitt.edu (Alan B Saul)
Newsgroups: rec.music.bluenote
Subject: On liner notes (long)
Date: 17 Dec 92 11:33:49 GMT
Organization: University of Pittsburgh

Here's a few more liner note excerpts, copying a recent post of Sandeep's. I
thought it might be of interest to compare a few commentators who are familiar
to those of us who bought LPs in the 60s and 70s. Perhaps it will be stimulating
for those who aren't so familiar with these cliches and inspirations. I'll leave
the musical sources to which these authors refer as an exercise for the reader.

First, Dan Morgenstern, former editor of Metronome, Jazz, and Down Beat, now
director of the Institute of Jazz Studies.
1. "You are holding in your hands a precious document - one of the most
important jazz records ever released....The tone is already distinctive; not yet
as full, as gleaming as it would become, but different, tangy. The sound is the
perfect vehicle for the ideas, which already pour forth, with the astonishing
fecundity that was to set him apart from ordinary - even extraordinary -
mortals. The most fully realized solos - on Honeysuckle and Lady - reveal his
unique combination of Lester Young's melodic and rhythmic freedom with Coleman
Hawkins' drive and harmonic strength; his truly new alternation of stresses on
weak and strong beats, of suspended time and double (even double double) time."

2. "The music that goes with this definitive instrumental approach is no less
personal. It resembles at times - in texture as well as voicings and melody -
the music of a village brass band or a military drum-and-bugle corps. In spite
of its abrasiveness, the music is quite gay and friendly - 'country' might be
the word for it. The harmonies are stark and almost primitive, with occasional
forays into bagpipe effects....Whatever one's reaction to this music, there can
be little doubt that it contained the spirit of jazz. Some may dismiss it as
untutored, primitive, or merely grotesque, but it certainly has the courage of
its convictions and is anything but boring or pretentious."

3. "This long unavailable album contains some fine, straight-ahead music. If you
are the sort of listener who likes his jazz labeled, classic hard bop will do.
More significantly, this was the debut recording date of Booker Little, a giant
of modern jazz trumpet....At the time, Brown was obviously Little's idol, though
he was no mere copy....He is already a remarkable instrumentalist, and that he
seems so much at ease in such fast company was due at least in part to the
presence in the band of George Coleman, also from Memphis, Booker's senior by
three years, and an idol of his when he was still in high school. ... Max is far
from retired from active playing, though we don't get enough of the man I
consider the greatest of all drummers in the music called jazz, with apologies
to Zutty Singleton, Dave Tough, Sid Catlett, Art Blakey, Roy Haynes, Buddy Rich
and Tony Williams."

Along a similar vein, here is some Ira Gitler.
4. "Here you have one of the best and most important groups in jazz history at
the earliest flush of its artistic success. Along with the Miles Davis quintet
of 1956, Art Blakey's Messengers and Horace Silver's group, Brown & Roach, Inc.
reflected a reaction against some of the more pallid outpourings of the 'cool'
school and the general lack of red corpuscles in West Coast jazz. More than any
of these groups it represented bebop taken to a new plane of refinement and
accomplishment."

5. "Bird's ability to invent myriad themes on the blues and 'I Got Rhythm', like
so many snowflakes, is incredible. Or it would be incredible if you didn't know
Charlie Parker. To really know him - as best as one can - you must listen to his
total output and read all the available material on him. I've just scratched the
surface here....Who was Bird? Stan Levey, his drummer on 52nd Street in 1944,
said 'My first impression of Charlie's playing was that he was a sort of a Pied
Piper. I'd never heard anything like it. I didn't really know what he was doing,
but it made me feel good to listen to him.' Bird was magic."

On to Leonard Feather:
6. "The most illustrious expatriate in the history of jazz died in Paris, May
14, 1959, on what was believed to be his 62nd birthday....The sui generis heavy
vibrato, the fluent motion on fast tempos and strong melodic emphasis on slow
ballads...These sides represented a sad adieu to Sidney Bechet; but for many
listeners today they mean bienvenu once again to a unique and fondly remembered
sound, now touched with the aura of nostalgia."

7. "Between these covers lies the harvest of a journey through the mind of Bud
Powell. It is a journey in which beauty and darkness, pleasure and sorrow are to
be gleaned along the way; for this mind is a strange land, endowed with a glow
of genius yet beset by illness and deprivation."

8. "In summing up the musical objectives and content of this album, I would
advise the listener to approach it without any preconceptions....do not waste
time trying to determine how near or far this or that passage may be from jazz
or from any particular bird's nest or pigeon-hole. Look only for a blend of
inspiration, discipline, scholarship and freedom. Such elements are not easily
amalgamated. Certainly this is one of the few albums in musical history to have
attained this end within the ever-broadening framework, not of jazz, not of
classics, but of twentieth-century American music."

Here is the easily recognizable Ralph Gleason:
9. "music is the greatest of the arts for me because it cuts through everything,
needs no aids. it is. it simply is. and in contemporary music miles defines the
terms. that's all. it's his turf."

10. "It was, really, Max Roach who first made those sounds on drums which said
'this is how it will be' and were instantly recognizable as right....It's really
as simple as that on one level, though incredibly sophisticated and complicated
on another....He is a dramatic example of how the drummer can be leader of a
group that is harmonically and melodically, as well as rhythmically complex,
innovative and interesting. And that is, of course, because Max Roach has always
played the drums that way."

11. "That John Coltrane is one of the most important musicians in jazz is no
news, of course, to those that have been intimately concerned with jazz music,
as laymen or musicians, in recent years....It may surprise some to learn that
John Coltrane is not only a major jazz musician but a man who is constantly
involved in an agonizing reappraisal of his approach to his art."

Some Nat Hentoff for counterpoint:
12. "...one quality that can always be expected from Coltrane is intensity. He
asks so much of himself that he can thereby bring a great deal to the listener
who is also willing to try relatively unexplored territory with him."

13. "It is this quality of unquenchable openness to experience which pervades
these recordings. As familiar as these songs had become to her, she was able to
continually reanimate them, to make each new performance provide a further
insight into the possibilities of the song - and of herself."

14. "If you're a person, however, you take risks. Many kinds of risks. That's
why most jazz people I've known have been such authentically distinctive people.
Jazz is risk. And the musician's life being inextricably intertwined with the
music that is jazz, the risk-taking goes on off the bandstand....Always, his
music is intensely, thrustingly palpable - a persistent personal witnessing,
questioning, exulting, despairing, raging, and sometimes laughing."

15. "When I hear a musician for the first time, I'm not as sure of my judgement
as I suppose a critic ought to be. In fact, it sometimes takes me a very long
time indeed to really comprehend what a musician is doing and to be clear about
my own reaction. Once in a great while, however, I have no doubts from the very
beginning. The talent is so clear and compelling that, in a sense, the judgement
is made almost before I'm aware it's been made."

16. "...what he has already done is important and makes him, in one sense, 'in
the avant garde of everybody,' as Martin Williams puts it. Most important is his
emotional message. Much of the musical history of the Negro in America is in his
work, but not as an anthology. He's a new user of that basic language with his
own additions to make."

So on to Williams:
17. "Russell's music sprang from no forced or contrived effort to 'improve'
jazz. I doubt if any worthwhile jazz could come out of such an attitude; surely
jazz is too spontaneously natural an art, with too human a history to respond to
such treatment."

18. "He had indeed absorbed Charlie Parker and I don't think that John Coltrane
ever did that. The undercurrent in a Coltrane solo is still the Coleman
Hawkins-Don Byas heavy/light accentuation that basically is as old as the
earliest New Orleans jazz. And Coltrane did not get around to truly 'free'
improvising until the time of Ascension - until the time of his association with
Eric. Previously, he had improvised on chord progressions, increasingly tight
and challenging chord progressions on pieces like Moment's Notice and Giant
Steps. Or he had improvised from a mode or an assigned series of notes, as on
Impressions or A Love Supreme....On his own pieces, Ornette's improvisations do
stray out of the basic key occasionally and in that sense can even be called
momentarily atonal. But it happens that they can also be heard modally. That is
an observation after-the-fact however and not Coleman's point of departure. To
put it another way, to play modally isn't to play free, but to play free often
turns out to be modal in practice."

19. "This is an exceptional record - exceptional in so many ways that it is hard
to know where to begin!"

20. "But no, that's not the way I should begin these notes. For there are some
real treasures in this album. And I'd better get to telling you what they are -
maybe with a little less subjectivity."

21. "As several developments in jazz in the last few years have shown, no one
really needs to state all those chords that nearly everyone uses, and as some
events have shown, if someone does state them or if a soloist implies them, he
may end up with a harassed running up and down scales at those 'advanced'
intervals like a rat in a harmonic maze. Someone had to break through the walls
that those harmonies have built and restore melody - but, again, we realize this
only after an Ornette Coleman has begun to do it."

Jumping ahead to Robert Palmer:
22. "The only credentials you need are human form and planetary citizenship. And
that's all you need to get into this music. It emphasizes the feelings we all
share as human beings; each musician plays his own biological rhythms, the
dimly-remembered experiences of his past lives, and what he had for breakfast."

23. "When heard superficially, this music seems simple, almost trite. Most of
the melodies are based on tonic, subdominant, and dominant triads and sound like
you've heard them before somewhere (only you can't quite remember where). The
solos are more or less interchangeable from one tune to another. But Ayler was
not playing jazz in the old sense; he was so deeply involved in black tradition
that he didn't have to. He was playing a music of divine Revelation, a music of
direct experience of the ineffable."

Continuing this thought with Michael Cuscuna:
24. "He did not grow out of modern jazz's evolutionary processes as had George
Russell, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane and Archie Shepp. The beauty and heritage
of the saxophonist's music opened up for me personally, when I heard a rather
rare tape of the Eureka Brass Band of New Orleans, a band of black musicians
that were part of jazz's inception and development. The spare, straight rhythms
with strange syncopated undercurrents, the variable pitch of the horns, the
marches and spirituals, the primitive, but strong melodic quality of the music
and especially the clarinetist, with his wide open vibrato, bending notes into
the most haunting of melodies. Suddenly, I felt an understanding of where Albert
Ayler was actually coming from. Not outer space, but the most basic roots of
African and Afro-American musical tradition."

25. "Taylor is a powerful, two-handed pianist who uses his roots in an
extraordinary way. He often plays a cascade of notes with his right hand, while
his left pounds out an insistent bass melody or a progression. The result is a
style that employs the techniques of stride and bop. His powerful attack, his
frantic pace and his then unfamiliar harmonies gave Taylor's playing a deep,
underlying sense of melody and lyricism. His characteristic arpeggios, thumping
bass parts, unique chord clusters, spasmodic carting figures and scale-based
flights are building elements within Taylor's music; they are inventive parts of
a whole that is purely musical, never merely chaotic."

26. "Charles Mingus is a most amazing and creative force in American black
music. He absorbed the past and foreshadowed the future; yet his music is
self-contained and truly unique. By the strictest Western musical codes, Mingus'
music might be considered sloppy. It is not. This man does not restrict his
music with exacting arrangements. He builds an intricate melodic and harmonic
framework that allows total freedom of expression for both himself as a composer
and his sidemen as creative improvisers. His music is always strangely cohesive
and extremely effective."

Here's some of what A.B. Spellman has to say:
27. "What this is is a plexus of voices, all of different kinds, but most
belonging to that generation which grew up on Mingus, Monk, Taylor, McLean,
Coleman, Coltrane, the human rights struggle, and nuclear weapons."

28. "This is not music to roller skate by. It is the kind of muscularly
individualistic stuff that will not tolerate indifference, that invokes such a
strong reaction in the hearer that these essentially emotional initial responses
must finally, thru qualification, be the basis of criticism. (The reader will
have noticed by now that this writer's considered bias is with the musicians on
this date.)"

29. "1960, when this record was made, was a crucial year in jazz. The fifties
had ended, and in some jazz quarters it was felt that the varieties of bebop
employed by the main streams of the fifties had played themselves out. The
recrudescence of Monk and Monkism had given impetus to some new forces, however,
and the old guard was being assaulted on three main fronts: harmonic (Coltrane),
tonal (Cecil Taylor), and rhythmic-melodic (Ornette Coleman)."

One person commenting on his own work, Rahsaan Roland Kirk:
30. "When I die I want them to play The Black and Crazy Blues, I want to be
cremated, put in a bag of pot and I want beautiful people to smoke me and hope
they get something out of it."

31. "I have accepted the fact that a lot of people are still asleep and will
stay asleep on these duets and sounds that are a part of my life - my black
experience. To me this music is very motivative and is very revolutionary in its
own way. It projects for me my experiences and gratitudes of all the beautiful
Duke Ellingtons, Mingus', Tatums, J.C.T., S.B., J.B., J.P.J., W.M., D.R., C.P.,
C.B., R.H., B.H., S.V., B.B., H.K., M.T., B.H., and after you hear this record
do some close research on all these initials and I am sure you will agree."

Finally, my favorite liner notemaker, Claude Delcloo:
32. "Sun Ra, alias Le Sony'r Ra, alias Sonny Blount is one of the most important
phenomenes that the jazz music ever knew, and also a personnage so mystical that
we have sometimes difficulties to keep serious (himself also)."

33. "Originality, Roscoe get it. Because he don't limit himself to duplicate
cliches or style of those two musicians. As a matter of fact, he situe his
departure from the strong basis which are those given by the research of Coleman
and Dolphy. Starting from there, he exploit some new possibilities of sound and
phrase. Roscoe Mitchell is an important musician, because he's worry to make
original work, heUs never falling in duplication, and his originality can't be
brought down by an finicality or any want of interest coming sometimes from the
absolute care of the musician to do original work."


Hope these made you think of something beautiful, or laugh.

Alan Saul
saul@unixd.cis.pitt.edu


Newsgroups: rec.music.bluenote