...it points to a major difference between rock and jazz. Rock works best when it focuses and directs the desires of listeners, while the pleasures of jazz center on its capacity to encourage free intellectual and emotional play. (Michael Jarrett, "Jazz Reissues," Pulse! 1993-09)
...these feelings come to all of us who are lucky enough to live so long. They accompany the ultimately unavoidable realization that our basic relation to time—which is to say to possibility, to memory—has changed. The former diminishes as the latter grows, and there is nothing to be done. At a certain point in adulthood the weights seem equally distributed, the balance is at rest. And then, a moment later, it begins to tip, imperceptibly at first, then more obviously. (Sven Birkerts, " 'Live All You Can,' " in Reading Life: Books for the Ages, 2007, Graywolf Press, p. 156)
...a novel for me is a pretext, a way of starting up and sustaining a complicated and many-layered inner exchange, a to-and-fro which I long ago discovered that I need in order to locate myself in the world. Reading is a process that keeps the inner realm open, susceptible. Involvement in a book sets things going at a depth. (Sven Birkerts, "The Possibility of the Search," in Reading Life: Books for the Ages, 2007, Graywolf Press, p. 130)
The best compliment I ever had after a concert was a guy who came up to me--he said he was a conceptual artist, a sculptor--and he said, "I've been having a real problem with one of my pieces and I listened to this piece of yours and I had a tremendous breakthrough." That is what this music is all about. It's about waking people up or helping them to solve problems for themselves in the context of their own lives. It's not about being a messiah or being the greatest music of all time. I think that's shit! Affect people in a way that helps them be more creative with their own lives. --Larry Ochs, quoted in Michael Goldberg, "ROVA Saxophone Quartet Wants You to Wake Up," Downbeat, 1981-01, p. 25
Possibly I believed, as most survivors of higher education believe, that a book is somehow used up, finished, by our reading; that it is a device, spring-loaded with themes and characters, which discharges itself fully as we finish, and that anything else—our memories and references—constitutes a kind of dreamlike residue. I no longer think so. Reading infiltrates. Books stay alive, not just in the active imagination, but in the very structures of our awareness. (Sven Birkerts, "The Reading Life," in Reading Life: Books for the Ages, 2007, Graywolf Press, p. 21)
...I mean the first time I saw Carmen Amaya dance, in 1955, it was as though everything stopped for me, I mean everything stopped. When you see that. Now that, to me, is the highest kind of compliment that can be paid to another artist, to make somebody else lose all sense of time, all sense of their own existence outside, like the perception of all their energies on that figure. That to me is the greatest. (Cecil Taylor, interview with Bill Smith, 1974-09-07)
This is absolutely what it was like for me every time I saw Cecil Taylor live. (And that Bill Smith interview is one of the best I've read with Mr. Taylor.)
...I realized something about record collections. I've long understood that what they represent, in aggregate, is time, and if you look at their spines you're looking at a visual marker of potential time, roughly five LPs per inch, at forty minutes per, so each linear foot equals nearly twenty-four hundred minutes or forty hours of continuous listening duration. When a collector is young, what their collection represents to them is boundless possibility, the optimism of time unspent; as the years press on, the collection comes to suggest something different, the inevitability of the unfulfilled, potential time that will never be realized. I will not listen to the bulk of my records again. I console myself: there they are if I need them. (John Corbett, Microgroove: Forays into Other Music, 2015, p. 428)
I'm working on it...
His philosophy was a vision of progress--of a future, inspired by black American culture, that would be as glorious in its own way as the one promised by the technological advances of a segregated American society. Ra affirmed that the musical past of jazz was part of the avant-garde, so far ahead of its time that he and his musicians were still struggling to catch up with it. (Richard Brody, "The Sun Ra Centanary," New Yorker, 2014-05-22)
Despite the expertise of other contemporary big bands, it is in hearing the most avant garde of them all, the Arkestra, play Prelude To A Kiss or Blue Lou, that the listener feels what it must have been like to hear, say, Duke Ellington circa 1940, and when that same quality--the freedom of texture and improvisation combined with the ability to swing--is heard here immediately afterwards on Lights On A Satellite, the largeness of the Arkestra's accomplishment is made clear. (David Lee, "Notes from the Basement," Coda May/June 1994, issue 255)
"The Making of Americans" is a very important thing and everybody ought to be reading at or it -- Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (1937), quoted in Steven Myer, "Introduction," The Making of Americans p. xiv (Dalkey Archive, 1995)
I like what Jason Weiss had to say about Sun Ra and Blue Delight: "What emerges time and again is 1001 ways of reading the blues" ("Sun Ra: The Living Future," Village Voice, 1989-07-04): a trait Ra shares with Duke Ellington.
...as a pianist, Sun Ra is one of my absolute favorites. I own all of his solo piano records; he has that same thing that I love in Jaki Byard, a brilliant way of abstracting theme and harmony, of redistributing them as perceived in fragments, in such a way that he seems to be putting together the pieces of a puzzle. Clearly this was a great musical mind at work, and his piano playing is the epitome of the kind of jazz I prefer: built on harmonic exploration and somewhat vague thematic disbursement, but tied together by a deep, really old-time sensibility that looks very perceptively at the jazz/American song confluence. (Allen Lowe, quoted in "Allen Lowe: No Holds Barred," by Troy Collins, Point of Departure, issue 84, Sept. 2023)
As with all committed writers, form, for Ross Macdonald, was not something to chafe against, but to transmute and develop within its own container. Through his early deference to a rigorous and conventionalized form his later, unconventional art flourished. (Gilbert Sorrentino, "Ross Macdonald: Some Remarks on the Limitations of Form," in Something Said: Essays, North Point Press, 1984, p. 226)
...and of course, the same thing is true for Sorrentino himself.
He was playing some very advanced harmonic and rhythmic information on the saxophone. His rhythmic approach was amazing. John used to tell me about practicing out of drum books, working on rhythmic patterns. ... It gives you a grounding in rhythmic patterns that you wouldn't ordinarily have, playing a melodic instrument. Gilmore's playing was very rhythmic playing. I don't meant that it was necessarily always busy, even if at times it was. It's more that there were very unusual rhythmic patterns in his playing. A lot of people knew about his musical thinking; Coltrane used to come and listen to him play. Gilmore was a highly sophisticated player, and totally original. (Threadgill, Easily Slip into Another World, Knopf 2023, p. 37)
The radio was on from beyond a wall and the sound was coming in through static. The Beatles were singing, "Do You Want to Know a Secret." They were so easy to accept, so solid. (Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1, Simon & Schuster 2004, p. 204)
Of course I shouldn't have been surprised, but still it was nice to see...
It was mostly a jazz coffeehouse where Cecil Taylor played a lot. I played there with Cecil once. We played "The Water Is Wide," the old folk song. Cecil could play regular piano if he wanted to. (Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1, Simon & Schuster 2004, p. 74)
This seems about right...
When to read
Mine is a simple system: I read from morning till bedtime, with breaks for my job, family, meetings with friends, exercise, household chores and periodic review of my life’s greatest blunders. (Michael Dirda, "10 rules for reading from someone who does it for a living," Washington Post, 2024-05-18)
Ringo’s work here [on "Tomorrow Never Knows"] is, like in a million other places on this album and the rest, amazing. It seems like every few years there’s a misguided debate about technical ability and rock-and-roll drumming, or a reductive Greatest Rock Drummers list, and usually that debate or that list ends up undervaluing Ringo. From one drummer to another, I can say that he does one of the hardest things imaginable, which is to put a human stamp on drumming, to innovate in subtle ways that don’t detract from the song but enhance it, and to define and maintain the groove. Nice work, Ringo. Better than nice work. Songs like these pushed rock forward, which is why they meant so much to audiences of the future. (Questlove, "Evolver," in Revolver Super Deluxe Ed. book, 2022)
...the Memphis influence is most prominent in Ringo Starr’s drumming, where the backbeat is as rock-solid as anything this side of Al Jackson, Jr., the great Stax session drummer. There’s long been a jokey idea that Ringo Starr is a second-rate drummer, one that probably originated with his affable willingness to serve as the source of comic relief in early press conferences and films like A Hard Day’s Night and Help! This notion is stupid, to put it mildly. Ringo Starr is a great drummer, and in 1966 he was at the top of his craft. (Jack Hamilton, "The Beatles’ Revolver Was Their Avant-Garde R&B Album," Slate 2022-10-28)
Hamilton goes on to say, "To my ears the most audacious drum performance on Revolver is “She Said She Said,” which finds Ringo holding down a murderous groove while simultaneously providing an onslaught of cascading, over-the-bar drum fills. There was simply no one else playing drums quite like this in pop music." Right on, Jack!
Great writing about improvisation, from Taylor Ho Bynum's excellent essay on the new Cecil Taylor release from 1973. The context is Cecil, but the notion is universal:
There is an element of improvisation, especially when so expertly realized, that is akin to meditation. You are aware of all the thoughts floating through your head but continually letting them go to connect to the present moment, as a performer and a listener. Thoughts, fears, anxieties all inevitably arise—the brain does work at a furious pace—and by welcoming them, accepting them, articulating them, we can let them go. We can work out the puzzles of our own minds, embrace the unknowable together until it’s transformed into a creativity that needs no definition. (Taylor Ho Bynum, "Forty-Four Thoughts for Cecil Taylor," The Baffler (2022-02-22)
