John Coltrane vs. Eddie Van Halen

http://www.everythingblows.com/rant.cfm?ID=191&startrow=1

-- neil (neilemmerson33@yahoo.co.uk), May 31, 2002.

Thank you for sharing that website, I was unaware of the possible connection between John Coltrane and LSD. However most of what I've read doesn't support this, he even said himself in the liner notes to A Love Supreme, however this might not be true, he might have been taking it.

'Free Jazz Free Pass' - I wonder if, in the UK at least, this has anything to do w/ Phillip Larkin's fear and loathing of mid-late JC - by default JC came to stand for non-trad 'progress'?

But the real innovators were Jazz guitarist, like James Blood Ulmer (with Ornette Coleman), Derek Bailey (solo, man listen to him, he plays the guitar like no-one else), Sonny Sharrock (with Last Exit, the free jazz SUPERGROUP), AND Lenny Breau!!! he could play a bass line while playing a melody, at the same time. If you want Fast guitar playing, and this is 10 times faster than Farlow, listen to Joe Pass, forget about John Mclaughlin, this is the real thing, he played mostly acoustic guitar, proving his power more.

That's the stuff you're supposed to be a little skeptical about.

but whatevah yr opinion of col's mysticism surely it is too difficult (impossible?) to demolish solo=soulo impasse without it. mysticism was smokescreen for all-inclusive group play behind John Coltrane TM, allowing likes of drumma Rashied Ali (real genius of later records?) to flourish. do you like those later recs only for coltrane's input? no. regrettable cult of personality for sure but ultimately necessary I think. In any case things get twisted in the hands of the fans rather than on coltrane's part. It's not my bag, but i don't find it intrusive.

Jordan, I would like to give this some thought and see if I can answer in more detail what it is that I like about some jazz, despite not really considering myself a jazz fan. (I've listened to a fair amount of it for someone who is not a jazz fan.) In very broad terms, for instance, I like the idea of improvisation. I have listened to a lot of Arabic music and some other middle eastern music which involves a lot of improvisation. With Coltrane, sometimes I just like the tone he gets from his instrument which to me seems to have a very individual stamp on it.

The more I think about it, the more confused I get. I think I'd better answer further some time when I have more energy. I do like quite a bit of Sun Ra's recordings, and find John Gilmore's style extremely appealing much of the time.

(I'm still thinking. I have no idea why I have posted so much to this thread.)

Getting back to jazz, more generally. A lot of it simply boils down to: I don't especially like early jazz, or swing (as a genre, though not necessarily in the broader sense); so I don't connect much to the roots of jazz, which would explain why I am more likely to enjoy jazz as it gets further away from those roots. Still, there have been exceptions. I think I am more likely to enjoy these things in a live performance. If nothing else, there is the sense of something unfolding. I'm saying that I don't like swing, and yet I have found myself uncontrollably tapping my foot to the Sun Ra Arkestra within the past year, during fairly straight forward swing numbers. But if I put on most swing recordings, especially older ones, but necessarily, I almost immediately want to turn them off.

Like about jazz? I don't think it's just the image. I am attracted in some ways to the seriousness of it, the fact that there seems to be a lot going on, but that's not enough to get me to enjoy what's going on.

As with other music, often I get turned off right away because I don't like the feelings it evokes in me. Too often it reminds me of a vague afternoon headache.

I don't think I can answer Jordan's question in a meaningful way. It is too difficult to say just why I like something or don't like something. Why does Sun Ra's quite traditional "Dark Clouds with Silver Linings" resonate with me in a way that, say, Coltrane's "Soul Eyes" (now playing) does not? I like music in which the musicians seem to be listening to what they are playing and responding to their own playing. Is that a clue? But that presumably goes on in good jazz most of the time.

Sometimes it seems happy in a way I can't believe, but that's how I used to feel about salsa before I started dancing to it. But I took some swing classes and that didn't radically change how I responded to swing. Sometimes it is melancholy in a way that feels oppressive to me.

I find that most predictions of the "you like x music, you might like y jazz player" are not true for me. I like (modal) Arabic music: I might find "Coltrane Ole" a good entry point. But I don't, really. Or someone else has suggested Ayler on that basis. Well, one or two tracks that I like when I'm in the right mood. And, no I don't like most Latin jazz that I have heard, despite liking salsa and some other Latin music. (If anything, I think Latin jazz is too busy being jazz in a straightforward way, because it already is something besides jazz, so if it's going to be jazz at all it can't be jazz on the frontier of jazz. This is just an impression/guess and I know that mnay people think that Latin jazz is in fact one of the most vibrant areas of jazz where interesting things are being done.) I like electric guitar, but I don't generally like the way it's used in jazz. I like some work by Fred Frith and Henry Kaiser and Hans Reichel, all of whom have some degree of connection to jazz, but I wouldn't consider any of them to be jazz. If you look at the elements in their music that are shared with jazz, maybe that's a clue as to what I like in jazz.

The "musical elements" that exist no matter what the genre is: if you somehow capture them without any genre coloring I don't think you'd be left with any music, but you might have a nice Platonic ideal.

Ok, anytime anyone evr says that ILX used to be so much better than it is now, plz point them to this astounding, breathtaking thread. This whole thread is so ignorant about about jazz it's... well...

So Sad.

forget his exact words but my memory seems convinced that he meant manual squeezing shd be involved, i think he did a gesture

Def gonna call my jazz fusion collabo with Carlos "Nether Regions"