Kamasi Washington - The Epic

are you literally arguing for judging an album by its cover

brave, critical appraisal there tell me more

I'm saying if people were more inclined to listen to this because of the cover, why is it bad for someone to reject it based on the cover?

two groups of idiots that deserve each other imo

No no no Never mind, you sound grumpy.

You must be really special. You've never been inclined to check out an album because of the sleeve artwork? How is is bad? Or "idiotic"?

still not sure what the argument is -- people *should* check out an album if they think the cover art is cool? people *shouldn't* check out an album if they think the cover art is cool?

I'm not arguing that "people only like this album because it looks cool", I'm just acknowledging that it happens and that it's a worthwhile thing to discuss. Ppl getting all mad seem to think they're being accused of being racists or squares or something???

this thread got stupid

Fuck you

afaict the people who checked out the album based on the cover are doing so for the wrong reasons and don't actually like jazz, they just like spiritual hats, and should be judged accordingly as apostates before the altar of canonical jazz cats like Duke Ellington who btw is much better

this whole line of argument is stupid, it has nothing to do with the album in question and everything to do with D-40's tendency to engage in audience strawman ad hom criticism, which should be beneath us tbh

I preferred the posts on why people liked/disliked the music.

I like the cover - it looks great.

don't get me wrong the whole spiritual hat thing and associated threads are very funny

but indulging the readymade opinions of someone who hasn't bothered to listen to the record isn't really in anyone's interest

xp

A friend wants to know if they have been selling the 3xLP at the gigs?

man this place used to be the one place where i wouldn't have to read page after page of people backpatting for agreeing w/ critical consensus now you can't even talk about how it's covered ??

i'm quite interested in this world but I don't see anyone else, including fans of it, really talking about it in ways that get at what makes it unique or now or whatever, i'm looking for the discussion to sell me on it & no one is doing that here, and then its like "LOL YOU HAVENT EVEN LISTENED TO IT" and its like, no, because i don't make it a mission to keep up w/ jazz generally and as someone who did for many years i'm definitely not about to do so again just because a bunch of rock critics decided this is the one time you should

esp from people who are like "no i don't want pitchfork reviewing more jazz!!" yes that would be the worst, if jazz started getting coverage from places people actually read sometimes!!

jazz is not a closed circuit of boring shit that once in a long while shits out a genius auteur, it's a genre in which there are peaks & valleys and many artists doing lots of different things and i like to read criticism that acknowledges this fact instead of touching on the one thing that gets lots of attention as if that is a self-fulfilling rationalization for that attention.

Ayler had melodies; Charles Gayle doesn't

This has gone unchallenged for over four hours?

Gayle's piano stuff in particular is full of melodies. It's true he rarely played a "head" or anything like that, but his lines are full of quotes, repeated melodic motifs, etc. You talk like he's in Borbetomagus or something.

considering the ppl who read, write for, and edit pitchfork yes, w/o qualification, it would be a bad thing if they reviewed more jazz.

also jazz already gets coverage in places ppl actually read (which doesn't really describe pfork nowadays anyway)

Not everyone on this thread has been positive and the dialogue was actually pretty measured prior to this but again I feel like you read what you want to read

i bought this awhile back but haven't even opened it yet. my main reason for buying it was wanting to support current spiritual hat, being i am a big fan of spiritual hat, main reason i haven't listened to it is because there's already enough og spiritual hat to listen to for a good long time not sure why i'd want to listen to revival spiritual hat

he's not even wearing a hat on the album cover ffs

the hat is implied by the afro

also jazz already gets coverage in places ppl actually read (which doesn't really describe pfork nowadays anyway)

― balls, Monday, October 5, 2015 7:00 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

such as? no mentioning ny times or new yorker

or similar prestige pubs

Not everyone on this thread has been positive and the dialogue was actually pretty measured prior to this but again I feel like you read what you want to read

― Ma$e-en-scène (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, October 5, 2015 7:00 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its not about posi or negative I'm not looking for 'balance' its more about answering the question TLG poses, what is this doing that is NEW as opposed to MARKETABLE

Haha, ironically, the guy who wrote about this album for Pitchfork is a writer for the New Yorker, who covers jazz there! lol
http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/seth-colter-walls

one thing i think is missing I'm looking for is something about washington as a soloist which isn't really addressed in these reviews, which mostly stick to the macro sound of the album, as opposed to his strengths as a soloist, at least beyond the 'you'll hear a little coltrane, a little kenny garrett' like someone telling you the whiskey has an oak finish

Just admit you like arguing on the internet more than jazz. I bet your first post was more than 182 minutes ago.

i went to the gym and listened to lil herb

i find it hard to judge a lot of the solo playing on this record because a lot of the time there's either i. some really chops-heavy rhythm section playing which is not really reacting to the solo other than just being there and keeping on keeping on or ii. a celestial choir oohing and aahing at the wonders of the solo or iii. both

this kinda sets up any solo for INSTANT BATHOS

anyway i would like to thank this thread for making me get around to listening to charles gayle

such as? no mentioning ny times or new yorker

I'm not gonna pretend I get significant numbers of readers (we're talking triple digits on a good day), but I write about jazz pretty regularly.

People absolutely should judge albums by their covers. It's why covers exist.

https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5092/5401581533_547d300597_b.jpg

What explains the left-field success of the Tijuana Brass? Certainly some credit goes to the album's cover, which features a sultry model swathed in whipped cream. (Alpert, who co-owned the creative, independent A&M Records with Jerry Moss, recalled, years later, that this was the album where he "realized how important it is to be visual with instrumental music.")

http://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-i-ve-had-experiences-where-people-say-i-hated-jazz-before-i-heard-you-guys-i-m-like-kamasi-washington-106-64-22.jpg

love the lushness of this recording but none of the actual music has gotten a foothold in my brain yet

love the lushness of this recording but none of the actual music has gotten a foothold in my brain yet

To try and get meta about this discussion for a minute I wonder if part of the reason ppl are resistant to dismissiveness towards something like this is the nature of the Internet economy where there is seemingly such a huge gulf between truly popular ever present superstars and everything else, that even the most acclaimed records are treated as marginal and can't really drive a headline or garner much traffic. Like, "why are you picking on..." I can't imagine there is a single venue that would want to be known as the place that panned this record, in part just because it feels like you're picking on dudes who really aren't even making that much money in the grand scheme of things and who wants to be that asshole anyway

D, you should read the review I published on Burning Ambulance. It's not by me, it's by Anthony Dean-Harris of Nextbop.com, and it's simultaneously more negative than I would have been, and more in line with what you've been saying in this thread. I'd be interested to read your response.

I'm w/ d-40 on this

I agree w/that Anthony Dean-Harris review. kudos for pointing out the Makaya McCraven album

I'll check it out

a few thoughts:

1) i love all kinds of jazz (though admittedly pretty behind on contemporary (~past 30 years) jazz w/ a few exceptions and i agree with discussions itt and other threads that the centrality of ayler-pharoah-sun-ra-spiritual-free jazz in the "record collector" jazz canon is a little weird. i think d-40 is otm here even if i think he should listen to the album.

2) checking out or not checking out an album based on its cover art is a perfectly valid practice imo. i've been turned on to a ton of new music from the "noteworthy album covers" thread.

3) i am not sure what brimstead means by saying the cover art denotes a "hipster album" or "space rock"?? afro-futurism is a pretty established aesthetic in black music and anyone w/ a passing familiarity with idk black of the past 60 years would probably have no trouble seeing this album art as fitting pretty cozily in an afro-futurist tradition. maybe not a lot of contemporary jazz artists are doing much w/ afro-futurism but it is alive and well elsewhere that it does not necessarily code as retro to me to see an afro-futurist album cover in 2015. lol dude "space rock"??? i'm giving brimstead the benefit of the doubt here bc i think he is a good poster but "hipster as pejorative" has been discussed a lot obv and dismissing something as "hipster" often has the subtext that "hipster=white" and needs a little more unpacking when you are calling a creative work by person of color "hipster art," it is a fucked up imo and a little dangerous without more explaining what you are talking about. it is fine to talk about why white folks graduate toward some black artists but not others but just saying oh this codes as hipster is tricky imo.

2) i did play this whole thing a few weeks for a close friend of mine who is a professional jazz musician. we were hanging out cooking for a few hours so it was perfect to play it straight through for him, he was already a little familiar with it. he's around 50, been doing jazz gigs for a long time, teaches jazz at a university and is well-established in the local music scene where he lives. we've always talked about jazz a lot and i've always dug talking to him about it bc i'm not a musician and he is and it is always cool for me to break out of my "music listener" bubble and talk to people who make music. he's pretty opened minded about jazz, he's not a crouch-marsalis conservative, he loves even the farthest-out electric miles but is skeptical about ayler, pharaoh, etc but loves andrew hill and ornette. he dug the kamasi album but basically felt what upper mississippi shakedown said upthread -- "this guy's story isn't written yet" -- he felt like kamasi is fairly young and kind of an ambitious rookie and that is cool but that he has a long way to go towards maturity. he then played me some ambrose akinmusire and got very very excited about telling me what ambrose was doing. this is really just a "token musician's take" that i am offering here but he is a very close friend of mine and is godfather to one of my boys and i love his music so i valued his opinion a lot.

3) speaking of akinmusire, who also played on the kendrick album, it is a little interesting that kamasi is the jazz player who is getting all the attention while i've heard very little about ambrose in the aftermath of butterfly. (maybe bc ambrose album came out last year, before butterfly, and kamasi's album came out this year? idk whatever).

Ambrose got a lot of very favorable press when his first Blue Note album came out in 2011, but his second album for them, in 2014, was kind of a disappointment (I thought) and wasn't really as well received.

Also, Ambrose's music is generally a little more abstruse, more likely to appeal to musicians than average listeners. I'm not at all surprised that your friend would be into him.

there's a part of me that nags 'you're gonna find this pretty embarrassing in a few years'. i LOVED wynton marsalis' blue interlude when i was a kid so i'm speaking from experience there.

― balls, Sunday, October 4, 2015 11:30 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also i've let this sentiment guide some of my listening in the past (i.e. am i going to be embarrassed by this in the future?") and i think i've learned two things:

1) it does not matter in the slightest if in a few years i am embarrassed by something i'm enjoying right now
2) i am not even a very good predictor of what i will be embarrassed about in the future

macy gray syndrome

marcos otm

macy gray doesn't seem particularly embarassing really

Just the big hit, really.