on 3/17/03 12:17 AM, Julian at germ@iinet.net.au wrote:
I'm still a little unclear on what's the difference between you saying 'Free Jazz' is a bad record, and someone else saying something else (say, 'Freak In') is a bad record. And in that I am not being argumentative, but simply curious on what you're thinking.
I mean, your comment about making a 'better' (what the hell does that mean, anyway) record than 'Freak In' was a rather odd one, and your response to the 'Free Jazz' comment similarly puzzling...
Julian.
Without getting into a whole Ornette discussion again, I don't think FJ was well-concieved or executed at all. To my ear, things on that record take far too long to develop, I don't hear what I'd call rotary formation, which an eight piece band cries out for or everything starts to get thick (rotary formation is when there's a kind of organized "you play"here, "you don't play here" scheme that changes the size of the group and what instrument is really directing the traffic. The "lay out/play " events of the record seem more dictated by what the players felt they should do, and I don't think that served the idea very well. The end effect, to me, is of all one material, and that material all of one thickness. I have the same problems with Sun Ra's 60s stuff, before he really started writing certain kinds of events into the music that could be improvised around. If your asking me what free jazz records of that period I think served the concept well, I'd say the early Cecil Taylor stuff with Lacy, later sixties Sun Ra, Paul Bley's FOOTLOOSE (which some don't think of as free, but it sounds pretty free to me), and Coltrane LIVE IN SEATTLE (which, although it gets cluttered at times, you can hear everything in it enough to get past it since the band's not stomping all over each other). And for those of you wondering if there's ANY Ornette Coleman in which I find value (aside from every solo Don Cherry ever took), THIS IS OUR MUSIC is the one that has tunes on it I actually like, espec "Poise", "Humpty Dumpty", and "Blues Connotation". -- skip h http://www.skipheller.com