Slighcarp and Grimshaw

Mark, a guy i worked with at the bookstore said once, “If you don’t like jazz, you haven’t heard the right kind.” (Granted, this was a guy with couple thousand jazz records on vinyl–I didn’t then, nor do i now have anything on him.) I have come to believe that, even if Sarah’s stepmom would disagree. The pantheon is too damn big and varied for there to not be at least something you can stomach. I say this apropos of my recent glut of jazz purchases and my re-acclimation to records i forgot i owned–Mingus, Herbie Nichols, Chicago Underground, etc. I have picked up a new-ish Joe McPhee album called Port of Saints and subsequently listened to Nation Time and Trinity again–just killer, if you were wondering. I am listening to a new record with Ken Vandermark on it, sharing writing credits with bassist Adam Lane on an outing in Portugal called 4 Corners, which also features Paal Nilssen-Love and Magnus Broo from Atomic, among myriad others. It kind of rocks, with some seriously odd-timed vamping on the part of Nilssen-Love and Lane: it makes me happy, to say the least. I have the sneaking suspicion that i’m going to end up the dude pushing random, obscure jazz albums of today on the friends of my children in whom i see some inkling of musical adventure (well, actually i hope i can just push it on my own damn kids and they’ll tell their friends). In any case, jazz doesn’t stop astounding me. Music in general doesn’t either, but jazz…man, if you don’t know, i am going to have a hard time explaining it.

Although now I feel (thanks wikipedia) that i have a reasonable definitions of bebop, hard bop and what came after, call it modal or post-bop or whatever. That was a bit of a relief. More research obviously needs to be done. Anyone know where I can get a copy of Ear of the Behearer by Dewey Redman (father of Joshua, and a much more talented sax player, as far as i’m concerned)? The cd is out of print. I’m making a new list of stuff I need–it seems to be mostly from Blue Note in the 1950s and 1960s. I need to bone up on my history.

I finished Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan on Wednesday. I liked it quite a bit, but it was certainly no The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which it didn’t need to be to have me enjoy it. It seemed to be a warm-up to that book–taking the general arc of having four different approaches to the same question, except instead of being “What does one eat and why?”, it discussed the relationship of humans to apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes viewed through the lens of what desire they fulfill in human society–respectively: sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control. Each of these plants allows itself to be worked and cultivated by humans, effectively having learned what people want from them and evolving to give it to them. Pollan spends a lot of time thinking about his garden and its inhabitants, and uses that lens to leap from Johnny Appleseed to Holland in the 1600s to present-day Holland (for two different plants) to the Andes Mountains to Idaho and Monsanto’s genetic engineering that provides potatoes with their own insecticide–yum.

We don’t have tv, so we didn’t watch the Democratic debates last week–really? A snowman? I think i’m really excited by the sheer democratizing of the questions via youtube, but it falls squarely in the the amatuerization of the internet and culture in general that i hear is a problem nowadays. I honestly don’t think that this is a problem. Yes, there might be more ignorant douchebags weighing in with their interpretations of the new AFI album, but shouldn’t we trust people to be able to recognize and seek out those who do, in fact, know what they’re talking about? There is so much information available every moment of every day–if you want to, you can find someone who knows what the hell they’re talking about. And yes, the questions coming from the american people was a good concept, now we just need to make it better. We’re tweaking it. It’s all a process. It’ll be okay.

We just finished Angel. Totally worth watching, by the way. It’s no Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but very good. After seeing that in tandem with Firefly, i just think, please, just let Joss Whedon finish a damn story! It’ll be good, i swear! Sorry to go a little fanboy on you, but it’s rainy out and it’s been seriously summer for a week or so now, and the heat does nothing for my otherwise tenuous grip on linear thought. I didn’t even write this post in order. Feh.

Chris: I have really enjoyed your mix. I need to spend more time with it. Good luck with Germany.
Erika: I need to send you music. Email me your address.
Mike: I don’t know if you want music, but I’d send you some too. Thank you for the primer on wave functions and their ability to psychically debilitate me.

I miss my old friends and i love my new friends–we’re going to a wedding at the Explorer’s Club in NYC in October. Look it up; it looks exactly like you would think somewhere called the Explorer’s Club should look. It’s nice when things work out like that.

Every time I start one of these things, i have the hope that i’ll be able to speaking cohesively about one thing or another. Maybe if i did it more often, it would make them less scattered. But on the other hand, it has taken many years for me to come to be comfortable with my own being, and this might just be another phase of that acceptance.

…good intentions and all that.