The flattened American landscape of minor writers/: ALL that Jazz?!

[Robin Landseadel]

On Mar 1, 2009, at 9:04 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:

> The way Burns & Marsalis try to sell to the viewer the 1960s/70s is  
> sheer
> propaganda. These guys hate Free Jazz as much as they hate Electric  
> Jazz.
> And how they (plus Mr. Crouch) treated the immortal Miles Davis was
> outrageuosly respectless. About Ragtime and Satchmo I did learn a
> thing or two, though.
> Kai
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnFhnscKRXQ

Agree in toto. The Miles Davis video is great stuff.

The JSP issue of the Louis Armstrong Hot Fives & Sevens comes from a  
budget label that just happened to have the best transfer work of  
these classics. Wonderful stuff, sounding about as good as you can  
hope for material of this age:

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&q=hot+fives+cd&cid=11214149336080515593&sa=title#ps-sellers

The late, great R.T. Davis was the remastering engineer for JSP   
responsible for these transfers. A lot of first-rate mastering  
engineers post to Steve Hoffman's website and in these threads, praise  
R.T. Davis' work:

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=94168

My sense is that the real pivot point for jazz comes from Charlie  
Parker. Others may argue for points later—Davis, Coltrane, Braxton—or  
earlier—Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Paul Whiteman—but somewhere in  
between came the notion that Jazz was as well developed a music as the  
European Classical streams of music and deserved to be taken as  
seriously as Webern or  Boulez or Milton Babbitt. Gershwin's in there  
somewhere, but note that a lot of Charlie Parker's head charts were  
variations on "I Got Rhythm" and somewhere in the infinite archive is  
a recording of the Bird impinging on Ornette Coleman territory. Parker  
obviously overlaps with McClintic Sphere.

http://www.howardm.net/tsmonk/pynchon.php