Pardon? What (the hell) is that all about?

This is perfectly obvious and 1) does not indicate I'm taking up a binary partisan position (it was me that raised that matter) and 2) does not make me incumbent on 'proving' anything re. someone who has already declared their scepticism. Fine, be sceptical. It is not my job to prove anyone otherwise; they are free to do their own research if they want to ascertain WM's useful work: go and find it, yourself. 


That is about jazz. It is not about stating specifically who is or isn't calling women whores and bitches, it is not genuflecting to WM as some kind of saviour, it is not saying WM is addressing social work which is the job of other people, it is not suggesting anyone who disagrees with WM is all bad (since I don't entirely agree with his work myself either), and nothing I have said has been 'sweeping generalisations'.

I have been discussing jazz, and in this case WM and his role within it, with a peripheral point about other kinds of music and the culture and attitude it adopts. I have been fending off irrelevant criticism not my responsibility and 'prove it' games I will not react to and shall do so no more hence my last post. Kindly do not fire questions like that at me, when this is indeed rather obvious and further supplemented with other discussions I have intitiated.

Exactly so - this has not been discussion, it has been me fending off BS which is why I will not entertain that any further.

Are you sure you're the Admin here? I am not impressed, matey. I suggest you consider the answer I've just given to the question you posed.

Out of order John

Just checking you out greenfox. Audit completed 

Right, Mort the Mod stepping in here. I would hope that there is plenty of room here for people to express their opinions and to receive responses  from other members without feeling that they are being attacked or marginalised in any way.

There have been some truly interesting points raised here with potential for some great discussion.  Let`s continue on that path, eh? 

Please play nicely.   

Ok. Discussion. Because the meat of this rather silly set of exchanges, as Mort says, is rather interesting if we could drag our egos back to it.

Why do you think, greenfox, that the 'great achievements' of jazz are 'in the past'? And how would you define 'the past'? I actually think a lot of them are in the RECENT past, and perhaps in the here and now. Fusion? Surely a vital development! One of my favourite albums of all time is Bitches Brew - would you not say that it's an innovative album in terms of technique, musical language, the adjustment of interplay between band members that technology (and I'm thinking of Zawinal's keyboard work in particular) makes possible?  'Hip-Hopping'? Not sure what you mean there, but I think a lot of 1980s hip-hop was pretty progressive and innovative too, and mercifully free of the gun-toting, women-bashing sub-culture that you seem rightly to abhor. Is it so simple a picture? 'Rappety-rap'?  I'd like to know what you mean by that. There is a very old and very honourable tradition of 'rap', 'toasting', whatever we call it, going back well into the 1960s and rooted in Jamaican culture. Where do you see the break being made? And what about the likes of Parker (Evan, that is) and Bailey - et al. - who you seem to regard highly? A lot of others do here too. I like them because they're striving to make a kind of interactive sense of musical free improv that goes beyond the 'I'll go TOOT, and you can TOOT back, just to show you've heard me' school, and into a rather subtle overall conception of musical form and syntax. What do you think?

(I only ask these questions 'cos I'm interested in what you think!  )

You can say, 'yes I know how to use Google and because I'd love to know this (your words) I will click my mouse and research it and accept that greenfox is not going to try and educate me'.

You can say, 'yes John was rude and aggressive and didn't even acknowledge the answer to the question he made which was stated clearly and unambiguously showing that all greenfox wanted to do was discuss jazz, but had to deflect a lot of crap'.

You might even say, 'this is a topic of discourse about which I know little so I shouldn't presume to be some sort of critic who knows what the parameters and nuances are'.

Or perhaps even 'well now I've read the greenfox posts again I understand that I was attributing things to them he didn't actually say, and that must have been very aggravating'.

Shove off John, I don't know exactly what 'Admin' means but it suggests to me you should know better than behave as you did as I duly noted, pertaining to the substantive content I've tried to bring here and the BS and then accusations I've endured.

 
(My "ego" is nothing to do with it. I love jazz, like discussing it, and I'm a bit sick of the aggravating BS that's gone down here).

I have a musical/aesthetic preference for Monk, Coltrane, Powell, Rollins, etc. It's really as simple as that, and WM is in that respect on no stronger ground than me. I don't like much of what currently passes for jazz and think its not really even jazz. At R3 today for example much of the Claire Martin show could equally have been called cabaret singing.

I find Bitches Brew quite interesting, even revelatory when I first heard it, though its not a disc I've played for a long time; I don't want to. Apparently, Davis once said he wouldn't go on stage with that m***** f***** Wynton Marsalis - he didn't like him. But WM has described Davis as a "buffoon", referring to his silly rock-star clothes in his fusion period. Miles was interested in rock music, because that's where the money was. I find quite a few of his discs really very poor - bland stuff with an entirely different character to his masterpiece Kind Of Blue.

Its a matter of taste, ultimately: I really can't be bothered to recruit Bailey and others to support my case (he said jazz died round about the 60s) because it proves nothing and serves no purpose. While I thought Bitches Brew was interesting, I think it's also singularly so.

As for hip hop etc, I'm really not interested; I find it musically ugly and that this frequently coincides with ugly anti social attitudes.

But re. WM, my point is that some people who diss him have the same view on the deterioration of jazz so they are contradicting themselves: WM champions a former era of jazz when he thinks it was at its height. Extrapolating further, I see no reason to think jazz is a constant continuum and its quite possible it had its day and is now dead. Whether one thinks that or not is another matter, but its a perfectly valid possibility. My own view is probably that its substantially, but not entirely true; that there is some good stuff but also an awful of dross.