Henry Threadgill on John Gilmore

Henry Threadgill writes about John Gilmore:

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)
 

Easy to Accept

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)

 

Dylan on Cecil Taylor

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)

 

Dirda on When to Read

 

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)

Questlove on Ringo's Drumming on Revolver

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)

Ringo's Drumming on Revolver

 ...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!

Improvisation and Meditation

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)

Gerald Cleaver on Playing Free Music

 

If you're playing with some real fine improvisers, they're going to build some exceptional musical architecture. The idea of building structure is very important to me. It can be stream-of-consciousness playing as well. I relate it to a conversation. That cliché can become stretched, but you can elucidate a thesis in real time if you have enough understanding of your subject. It's like the joy of talking to people who know a lot about a lot of different things and are really passionate. You ask a question and they go off on a tangent and set up something new. That's what the music is to me. ("Gerald Cleaver," Modern Drummer 2014-07, p. 46)

Ronald Shannon Jackson on Drumming

 

Valerie Wilmer: How did it feel when you worked together with Ornette's son Denardo in his father's band?

Ronald Shannon Jackson: That was a challenge. It was a very interesting point in my life. Denardo plays from the spirit of joy. I had to learn another way of dialog--not learn--but I had to think differently, because in this country, drums can be a very ego instrument. Working with Ornette makes you feel you have to get rid of that and start thinking in terms of how you're going to make the music feel. (Valerie Wilmer, "Interview: Ronald Shannon Jackson," Down Beat August 1982, p. 68, emphasis in original)

Ringo

In most accounts, Ringo has been characterized as an average drummer with severe technical limitations. I would counter that such a characterization demonstrates a very narrow understanding of what constitutes good drumming technique--one that takes into account only speed and intricacy without acknowledging timbre and tempo management as vital aspects of drumming performance practice. (Steven Bauer, "Ringo Round Revolver: Rhythm, Timbre, and Tempo in Rock Drumming," in 'Every Sound There Is:' The Beatles' Revolver and the Transformation of Rock and Roll, ed. Russell Reising, Ashgate 2002, p. 179)

Why Not Indeed?

 

On the music of the MMM Quartet:

Experiencing such creative, distinct personal powers, acting with an admirable intense stamina, with a continuous motion of subtle details, is stimulating and sensual in an often weird way. It is a tour-de-force that celebrates their beings to the fullest, here and now, free.  A total form of art expressed in highly communicative interplay, delivered in an almost telepathic, collective yet highly eccentric camaraderie ...

This is the powerful role of art, the truest and most noble role. If we are bewildered by such an arresting performance that celebrates freedom in a most passionate and profound manner we may find ourselves overpowered by its very essence. We may then think: why can't we adopt such creative expressions? If we can enjoy this magnificent show of sensual freedom, why not desire to express such freedom and energy off-stage, post-listening? Why do we need to distance ourselves in our daily lives from common, collective expressions of unselfish compassion? And why are we not inspired to insist on more democratic forms of regimes not only in the artistic world but the world at large, that empower us all and not just the small, greedy and hedonistic elite? (Eyal Hareuveni, from liner notes to MMM Quartet Oakland/Lisboa, RogueArt 2015)

Time

  In old age, time becomes urgent.... (Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, 2011, p. 94)

Self-Reflective Revision

A nice account of one aspect of Finnegans Wake:

In a process of revision that is itself self-reflective, Joyce moulds language for purposes we cannot grasp, leaving us to guess at how to bring these strange words towards meaning, at how they might 'same with' other words. This game with language seems purely experimental, toying with fixed rules of language, but it also reflects on the common processes of language change and variation--such as the way phrasal verbs, expressions, and grammatical structure emerge (and fade) continually. It compresses and makes these processes explicit, while taking them to an extreme, continually stressing the materiality of language and suggests that we can, if we wish, do what we like with it. Joyce refuses to lag behind those changes that occur to language in its everyday use, wishing instead to embody the spirit of the transformation of expression.  (Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake, Oxford 2007, p. 203-204)

Old Times Good Times

...the fact that I can't understand people who want to go over and over old times, getting all nostalgic and stuff, the fact that I'm scared of old times, the fact that old times are soggy, saggy cradles of regret... (Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport, p. 57)

Time and Music

Time interacts in numerous ways with our perception of a piece of music: the circumstances—macro and micro—of our first and subsequent hearings; the duration and intensity of our listening; the seemingly ceaseless improvisation of memory. In a different way, there’s also the specific impact in time and a work’s general reception, its scale and assessment. --Stuart Broomer, "Eric Dolphy - Musical prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions," Free Jazz Collective 2019-02-04

Evan Parker on Improvisation

The improviser always has the edge in situations where the performance concerns itself with what can be, rather than what ought to be. (Evan Parker, "Introduction," in Soundweaving: Writings on Improvisation, ed. F. Schroeder and M. hAodha, 2014, p. 6)

Wallace on Punctuation

One measure of how good the writing is is how little effort it requires for the reader to track what's going on. For example, I am not an absolute believer in standard punctuation at all times, but one thing that's often a big shock to my students is that punctuation isn't merely a matter of pacing or how you would read something out loud. These marks are, in fact, cues to the reader for how very quickly to organize the various phrases and clauses of the sentence so the sentence as a whole makes sense. (David Foster Wallace, in Wallace and Bryan A. Garner, Quack This Way, 2013, pp. 85-86)

For Me It's Pynchon

...if you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers--not all of whom are modern... I mean, if you are willing to make allowances for the way English has changed, you can go way, way back with this--becomes a source of unbelievable joy. (David Foster Wallace, in Wallace and Bryan A. Garner, Quack This Way, 2013, p. 61)

The Beauty of the Semicolon

 
https://www.wm.edu/as/wrc/newresources/handouts/the-semicolon.pdf

The British call a period a "full stop," but sometimes you don't want to come to a halt at the end of an independent clause; you want to link it to the next independent clause by something more than sequentiality, and that's where the semicolon comes in. It is a signal that the thought expressed in the first independent clause is not yet complete, not truly independent; it indicates the next clause is not a new thought but a continuation and conclusion, like the second line in a couplet. Then you can use that full stop. (Steven Moore, "Of Cause and Consequence," in My Back Pages, 2017, p. 715)

Eddie Prévost on Sun Ra

Eddie Prévost on Sun Ra:

Jazz has often been in an unwittingly innocent postmodern state due to its references to the past--by way of the popular song--and unprepossessing self-referencing "quoting." Much of what I have heard of the New York based Lincoln Center project, curated and produced by Wynton Marsalis, falls into a more self-conscious category. This initiative is aggressively postmodern, suggesting a self-satisfied stasis happy to consolidate the innovative gains of the "jazz masters."

Contrast this with the wildly confident, uninhibited, unconventional output of Sun Ra: cod-Egyptology and fantastic sci-fi interwoven with joyous popular song; shades of free music together with big band jazz in a circus extravaganza; an -ism-busting complex whose archness audaciously defied categorization; an otherworldly postmodernism unconcerned with market motives. With extravagant costumes and fantastic ideology as soul-preserving strategies, the Arkestra remained firmly outside of the newly emerging black, middle class aspirational nexus. Sun Ra proved to be an exceptional exception. The general ethos of jazz now fully embraces the need to be understood and popular: it measures success by how well it commands the market. (Eddie Prévost, "Confronting a Darkening World: AMM at 50 years--An Aesthetic Memorandum," in Critical Studies in Improvisation, 11:1-2 (2017), pp. 6-7.