[NewMusic] Fat New Explosion

[Damon Smith]

Great quotes. Thanks.

Damon

On Mar 15, 2007, at 11:40 PM, Matthew Goodheart wrote:

> On Mar 15, 2007, at 5:49 PM, Chris Broderick wrote:
>
>> I'd say that Cecil is an iconoclast, in that his music was (and is)
>> percieved by some as an attack on jazz traditions. But I imagine he'd
>> be irritated to be thought of as such, and hardly thinks of his music
>> as attacking the settled beliefs of other musicians, institutions,
>> etc.  He's less interested in tearing down institutions than he is in
>> approaching music-making in his own way.  I doubt he's much interested
>> in shocking the prudes or raising the ire of critics.
>
> I doubt this very much. Sorry for the length here, but. . .
>
> During a panel discussion in 1966 Cecil asked for:
>
>   “a boycott  by Negro musicians of all jazz clubs in the United 
> States.
>   I also propose that there should be a boycott by Negro jazz musicians
> of all record companies . . . all trade papers dealing with music . . .
> and that all Negro musicians resign from every federated union in this
> county. Let’s take away the music from the people who control it.”
>
> In the Unit Structure's liner notes he wrote:
>
> "Time seen not as beats to be measured after academy’s podium angle.
> The classic order, stone churches with pillars poised, daggers ripping
> skies, castrati robed in fever pitch, stuff the stale sacrament,
> bloodless meat, for the fastidious eye; ‘offering’ sought the
> righteous; only found sterility in squares/never to curl limbs in
> reaction to soundless bottoms."
>
> In article in the Village Voice in 1963 he wrote:
>
> "Crtitics are sustained by our vitality. From afar, the uninformed egos
> ever growing arbitrarily attempt to give absolutes."
>
> The comments I heard from him during rehearsals in the mid-90's were
> right in line with these notions.
>
>  From the way I understand it, Taylor sees institutions as the ones who
> are attacking jazz tradition by destroying the creative forces that
> jazz represents: he is the one salvaging it/embracing it. He has said
> that “The greatness of jazz occurs because it includes all the mores
> and folkways of Negroes during the last fifty years.” The way I
> understand it, Cecil's "music" carries within it a rather radical (for
> the time) unification of history, individuality, spirituality, racial
> awareness, and cultural revolution. He is, in fact, extremely
> interested in tearing down traditional conceptions of music, technical
> practices, institutional authority, political-economic systems, even
> overturning the very language with which one talks about these things.
> It is deeply embedded in a philosophy that institutions and the "status
> quo" are corrupted things, and his practices represent a return to the
> deepest foundations of music; as Archie Shepp called his work, a
> "natural music." Here's a final quote from an interview with Len Lyons
> in the early 80's:
>
> "I'm interested in the cultural importance of the life of the music.
> The instrument a man uses is only a tool with which he makes his
> comment on the structure of the music. That's why the evaluation of
> what a cat says about how he plays music is not too far from the
> noninteresting things he does when he is playing. That person wouldn't
> have too profound an understanding of what has happened in the music
> and the culture. We have to define the procedures and examine the
> aesthetics that have shaped the history of the music."
>
>
>
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>