April 2003 - zorn-list - mailman.xmission.com

maria beatty dvds
by Lang Thompson 23 Apr '03

23 Apr '03

http://www.cultepics.com/ce_preview.html Don't remember this being mentioned but two Beatty films with Zorn scores will be released May 30. They look quite uninteresting but guess you never know.

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Re: Jazz Guggenheims
by Ellery Eskelin 23 Apr '03

23 Apr '03

skip Heller <velaires(a)earthlink.net> wrote: > In an ideal world, there would be be no subsidy to speak of. A musician > would have to go up in front of an audience, collect his fee from the > promotor, and sell his own records at the end of the night, and, whatever he > makes, that's the money. > (Before Ellery Eskelin objects to this, I've seen him sell enough to CDs at > one gig to cover a bandmember's plane ticket and motel room, so shut up and > prove my point, Ellery.) Hey Skip, No disagreement from me...in an "ideal world" that is. But we ain't got one 'a them. But hell, lot's of shit gets subsidized, all the way up to big business and their tax breaks...oh, and don't forget that those CDs we sell cost something up front, so it's not all gravy. Even if I made and pressed them myself it would still take awhile to recoup the investment, particularly if I want to pay my musicans what I think they're worth. Tour CD sales help but it may not be as much as it looks. But it's more and more becoming the norm to sell on the gigs since the shops are not at all consistent in stocking these things. And besides, Gerry Hemingway is the king of on stage sales, one night in Ann Arbor I witnessed 75 CDs fly off the stage during a 15 minute break. Now that's a decent chunk of change... > I remember seeing Ellery's trio in '95 in one of the little rooms at the Knit playing for less > people than I have fingers I remember that gig! > And I'm reasonably sure > this wasn't the only night that trio faced that unhappiness. No, but thankfully things are a little better these days... Oh and Herb, I get the digest version of the Z-list which is pretty mush straight text. And in your responses to my messages there is no visual distinction between your text and mine, so it's a little hard to read...but thanks for your comments. EE ================================= ELLeRY ESKELiN/MiCHELLE VAn NaTTA RaMiChElLeRy/PrImE SoUrCe PrOdUcTiOnS http://home.earthlink.net/~eskelin/ =================================

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Current Line-up of Fushitsusha
by David Keffer 23 Apr '03

23 Apr '03

>1) Anybody know what the current lineup of Fushitsusha is? I understand they >left behind the powertrio noise stuff and put Haino on drums. Is this still >going on? <bold> </bold>In January, 2000, Ikuro Takahashi stopped playing as the drummer of Fushitsusha. Since that time, Fushitsusha has been a duo consisting of Haino & Yasushi Ozawa. The most recent Fushitsusha studio release, "Origin's Hesitation", (PSF, PSFD 8010, 2001) features Haino on drums and vocals and Yasushi Ozawa on bass. Concerts during the latter half of 2000 as well as in 2001 featured this line-up. However, more recent concerts, which still feature the duo of Haino and Ozawa (such as the November 2002 at Tonic) featured Haino on guitar and vocals, i.e. there was no drummer in the band. I have not heard a confirmed line-up for the Fushitsusha show in Scotland on May 23, 2003, but my best guess is Haino (guitar, voice) & Ozawa (bass). More info at: http://www.planetc.com/users/keffer/haino/index.html David

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Re:brotzmann/crowds
by William York 23 Apr '03

23 Apr '03

<<you are probably right. i just remember thinking that there should have been many more people there than there were. it was brotzmann after all.>> he did play to about 30 people last year in oakland w/ marco eneidi and jackson krall ... and that show was awesome. better than the tentet if you ask me.. probably a smaller crowd b/c of the venue that night.

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Cage-i-ness
by Robert Pleshar 23 Apr '03

23 Apr '03

-- "Bones heal. Chicks dig scars. And the United States of America has the best doctor-to-daredevil ratio in the world." -Capt. Lance Murdoch I've been doing more thinking about Cage and his aesthetic for the past several months than I ever expected to, but I will try to keep this short and hopefully coherent. Cage has never been my favorite "modern" composer, but a friend and I have been working on a realization of his composition "A Dip in the Lake" which started mostly as a whimsical excuse to travel all over the Chicago area exploring. The piece is 427 chance-determined locations or addresses arranged into groups of 2,3 and 4. After spending parts of 2 years making the source recordings and the last 2 months mixing them, I think that the process is the whole thing with these sorts of pieces. The end result will be different everytime it is done and how it turns out really is simply not that important. "Quality" can't even be an issue at all. There might be some interesting sounds that come out and there might not. I have great respect for Cage's ideas and processes. I think that his ideas to take the individual out of the music as much as possible are interesting and that his ideas opened up music in a lot of ways (that might or might not have come about anyway) that later composers and musicians have used to other, often more effective, ends. I see him in a similar vein as an instrumentalist who I think is great, but doesn't play a type of music that I am particularly interested in. I am always happy to listen to these folks and learn from them and respect and admire them, but I don't go back to their records that often. There are a ton of bop guys who fall into this category for me, classical players, singers of all sorts, pop music producers who do interesting things, etc. I don't mean to give any disrespect to or put down anyone (especially people who are way better musicians than I am), but listening to their music is as much an academic exercise for me as Cage's music. A lot of the time I love academic exercises, but the music just doesn't reach me on that emotional level that certain music does. Cage was a great door-buster-downer, but he's no Johnny Cash. All that being said, I am glad that I embarked on the project and doing the field recordings especially opened my ears up to some sounds and ideas that were new to me or old sounds seen in a new light. So, I guess like just about everyone else, I'm ambivalent. Rob

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Re: Cage on Jazz
by Herb Levy 23 Apr '03

23 Apr '03

Skip wrote: Cage's comments were often designed to either cause some sort of debate or establish his place in a polemic. The remarks he made in the aforementioned article seem largely ill-founded, overly general, and smack of a feeling of superiority. All true. Equally true is the fact that in different interviews and discussions from various periods Cage said wildly contradictory things. In some later interviews Cage spoke highly of at least some kinds of improvisations &, for what it's worth, much of his argument against the work of Glenn Branca (well-known in some circles, not least, because Branca likes to position himself as the new music guy that Cage didn't like) seems to be rooted at least in part on Cage not liking fairly standard rock band gestures. So I'd take this quote with a lot of grains of salt. In general, for all the reasons that Skip states, I'm not sure it's worth a lot of time to defend or counter statements of Cage's opinions such as these. I am a bit more concerned with Patrice's closing paragraph: Anyway, what makes people feel that Cage has something relevant to say about music at large (as opposed to lab homeworks) since practically nobody seems to care listening to his music after more than fifty years. In many domains, this would be acknowledged as a total failure since the wrapping (the glose) ended up more important than the content (the music). Will Cage end up as another symptom of intellectual infatuation in the 20th century? I can understand Patrice not liking Cage's music. Based on your comments from the past eight years or so, I'd be surprised if there were many pieces by Cage that ever interested you. But, for better or for worse, since Cage's death, there's actually been a tremendous growth in the number of performances and recordings of Cage's music. I get press releases and flyers from new music presenters and ensembles from all over the States and a smattering of such from other countries & his music is being performed a LOT right now. It's even true here in Fort Worth, which is entirely NOT a hotbed of new music activity. If there were more than 2 concerts of music entirely composed after 1945 in any given year, it'd be a miracle. (& there's virtually no improvised music here at all.) But among the scattered 20th century works that have been performed by the Symphony and various resident and touring ensembles in the 3-4 years I've lived here, Cage is the second most performed composer (after Copland) with 7 performances that I know of. There are very few prolific composers who were primarily active after WWII who have as high a percentage of works for which there are more than one recording in print. Even labels dedicated to producing new music have to be concerned about sales, so someone's buying these things. -- Herb Levy P O Box 9369 Fort Worth, TX 76147 herb(a)eskimo.com

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Re: Jazz Guggenheims
by Herb Levy 23 Apr '03

23 Apr '03

Ellery Eskelin <eskelin(a)earthlink.net> wrote: Herb Levy <herb(a)eskimo.com> wrote: > I'm not sure the grant process is much more brutal than getting club > gigs or record contracts Perhaps, but I see that as no great virtue. Understood. > I certainly don't think of it as any kind > of remedy to those situations. It's just another option that's > somewhat more clearly public I don't know...I've always thought that grants were supposed to be a way to recognize artists in a way that the free market does not, at least with any consistency. Maybe I'm wrong on this? Grantmaking certainly works in a way that's distinct from the commercial market, but it has it's own built-in strengths and weaknesses. Like every selection process, some things won't get through. & some of those things that aren't well served by the grant process are also not well served by more standard commercial processes. > and, because in most instances, the > panel makeup changes periodically, more open to some kinds of > vagaries that I guess you're referring to when you use the word > "lottery." I used the word lottery because once you remove the handful of submissions that clearly don't meet the prerequisite guidelines the rest might as well be chosen out of a hat, regardless of who's on the panel and how often that panel changes. Ultimately, the idea of panels and of changing the panels is to make the process almost exactly NOT random as such, any particular panel having reasons for making the grants that they do, but, especially when looked at over time, the process IS largely random. Not that a panel is incapable of rewarding deserving artists, but due more to the fact that there are numerous deserving submissions that will never be funded due to financial limitations. True again, but rightly or wrongly I think the grant situation is seen as being more altruistic and fair in some way, in counterpoint to the purely free market system. And there are the post grant press releases that come from these organizations taking great pride in having determined who is deserving and the accompanying inference that these are necessarily the best folks to fund. Is this really any different than winning a critics poll? And then there's the cache of prestige associated with them. Of course I don't blame the grant presenters, they're doing the best they can and they should continue to do so. I just wanted to point out that the system of giving out grants is really just as f****ed up from a musician's standpoint as trying to get a gig or record deal, maybe more. Of course, some folks are better at it than others, for reasons usually having little to do with music, as has been covered. Exactly. However, it's probably good to point out that in jazz and improvised music there are usually some kinds of subsidies supporting whatever the endeavor once you scratch the surface. Festivals often receive corporate support, smaller presenting organizations often receive support from local businesses or regional arts councils, recording labels are frequently supported by more popular divisions of the company in the case of majors or run by someone who can afford to lose money year after year in the case of many independents. Even these grassroots tours throughout the US are often supported by a couple/few enthusiastic and industrious music fans in each town who devote their time, energy and money to producing concerts that would otherwise not happen. If the whole thing were to have to depend completely on the number of butts on the seats...well...you get the picture... Actually, virtually all art of any kind is subsidized to a great extent. Limiting my examples to music, in addition to the "alternative" economy that you describe which supports the music we usually discuss around here, look at the corporate underwriting for tours by hugely successful bands like the Rolling Stones (as if they somehow wouldn't make money otherwise, eh?), or the fact that the surplus income generated by pop mega-hits enables the major record companies to release a lot of other recordings (& yeah, I realize that this process mainly puts a lot of musicians in debt unless they invest the greater portion of their advance), etc. Or hey, look at how Tzadik is structured so that a few comparatively good sellers support the production of a lot of discs with more limited sales potential. -- Herb Levy P O Box 9369 Fort Worth, TX 76147 herb(a)eskimo.com

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Re: Cage on Jazz
by Crowmeat Bob 23 Apr '03

23 Apr '03

"You don't need to call it music if the term offends." and I've got this Tudor recording of 'Variations II" that kicks unholy ass. I don't see how anyone could listen to Zorn's 'Classic Guide to Strategy' and not see a direct connection to a Cagey aesthetic. >From: "Patrice L. Roussel" <proussel(a)ichips.intel.com> >To: Herb Levy <herb(a)eskimo.com> >CC: proussel(a)ichips.intel.com, zorn-list(a)mailman.xmission.com >Subject: Re: Cage on Jazz Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 09:21:50 -0700 > > Herb, > >On Tue, 22 Apr 2003 23:49:26 -0500 Herb Levy wrote: > > > > I can understand Patrice not liking Cage's music. Based on your > > comments from the past eight years or so, I'd be surprised if there > > were many pieces by Cage that ever interested you. But, for better or > > for worse, since Cage's death, there's actually been a tremendous > > growth in the number of performances and recordings of Cage's music. > > I get press releases and flyers from new music presenters and > > ensembles from all over the States and a smattering of such from > > other countries & his music is being performed a LOT right now. > > > > It's even true here in Fort Worth, which is entirely NOT a hotbed of > > new music activity. If there were more than 2 concerts of music > > entirely composed after 1945 in any given year, it'd be a miracle. (& > > there's virtually no improvised music here at all.) But among the > > scattered 20th century works that have been performed by the Symphony > > and various resident and touring ensembles in the 3-4 years I've > > lived here, Cage is the second most performed composer (after > > Copland) with 7 performances that I know of. > > > > There are very few prolific composers who were primarily active after > > WWII who have as high a percentage of works for which there are more > > than one recording in print. Even labels dedicated to producing new > > music have to be concerned about sales, so someone's buying these > > things. > >I guess I am more impressed by the general indifference (and when I say >general, I do not mean the people in the street, but the ones who really >love >music and are curious about it) than by the few signs about a possible >raising >interest in Cage. I can't remember any of my friends deeply in love with >experimental music ever saying anything positive about Cage's music (with >exceptions for his early pieces). It's all about anecdotes (the silent >piece), >the scandals (WILLIAM MIX), the weird ideas (CARTRIDGE MUSIC, use of chance >methods), etc. This is in fact a constant with Cage: people who are in his >music >rarely say a word about the music itself and mainly talk about his motives, >or ideas/philosophy. With Cage, the wrapping is the message. The music is >almost an obscene appendix that always fails to meet the level of >expectations >raised by the argumentation. I wonder sometimes why Cage ended up musician; >he could have applied his technique to practically any form of art since it >conveys nothing truly musical. And this is for me the problem: there is >little >(or no) music in Cage's collection of sounds. His motives go against >99.999% >of the music ever produced on Earth. > >I made many Cage tapes over the years. They were asked by friends who were >concerned that they might have missed something (and these are people not >affraid of getting their music on the spicy side). The result was polite >indifference and puzzlement at all the fuss that was made about that music. >But his books keep on being entertaining. > >It is ironic that two of the icons of XXth century music (Cage and Boulez) >might be mainly remembered for anything but their music :-). > > Patrice. > > >_______________________________________________ >zorn-list mailing list >zorn-list(a)mailman.xmission.com >To UNSUBSCRIBE or Change Your Subscription Options, go to the webpage below >http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/zorn-list _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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Re: Jazz Guggenheims
by William Crump 23 Apr '03

23 Apr '03

Have they played SF more than once? If you're talking about the show at the Great American Music Hall in 2000, I remember a lot more than 30 people being there. It wasn't wall to wall, but it was pretty well attended. I was there with Chain Gang Supervisor Rizzi ("What we have here is a failure to communicate...") and some friends of his... if he reads the list anymore, maybe he can give an estimated attendance. Best live jazz I've ever seen also. Jeb Bishop played like he had Tabasco dumped down his pants AND his hair was on fire. 2nd place was Masada in Memphis, November '97. William Crump ---------- >From: Chad Stockdale <chads(a)statenet.com> > > mentioning vandermark reminds me of seeing the brotzmann tentet + 2 > playing to about 20-30 people in s.f. and they played like their lives > were at stake. thats still the best jazz show ive ever seen. > >

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Keiji Haino
by Arthur Gadney 23 Apr '03

23 Apr '03

1) Anybody know what the current lineup of Fushitsusha is? I understand they left behind the powertrio noise stuff and put Haino on drums. Is this still going on? 2) Anyone know who to contact concerning booking of shows with Haino? I just saw that he is playing in Europe this summer and know somebody who might be interested in setting something else up for him. _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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