Sweet Music - Bitter Reviewer

I had thought about blogging-on about my music-ecology experiences, the madness involved in promoting performances of the musics of Schoenberg, Kagel, Kurtag, David Murray, and Oliver Lake in Detroit, Michigan and Columbus, Ohio. Indeed, I promised my reader to blog-on about it. I decided this morning - as I lay in bed deciding if and when to get up - not to blog-on about my dismal, depressing, disgusting mad-dog experiences as an unpaid music-ecology front-man for the imperialist 'Classical' music presenting establishment.
     I thought to myself this morning, Why not listen to music this Tuesday? Why not blog-on about what thrills you instead of blogging-on about what disgusts and chills you? Why not indeed!
     But there remains one disgusting matter that I must dispense with before "accentuating the positive". John S. Wilson, the former jazz reviewer for The New York Times is in my view the all-time, worst reviewer ever to have written about jazz. (His successors at NYT haven't been much better either.) Circa 1959 I got a copy of Wilson's book The Collector's Jazz: Modern - a volume presently held together by a rubber band. He trashes nearly all of my favorites - Gil Mille, John Coltrane, Donald Byrd, Jackie McLean(!), Art Blakey(!); while praising Stan Kenton, Les Brown, Lennie Niehaus, Shorty Rogers. Draw your own conclusion from this sample and juxtaposition. Terrible stuff, this Wilsonian hacking; making the jazz safe for us. Stick with Gunther Schuller, André Hodeir, Amiri Baraka, Whitney Balliett, A. B. Spellman, or Val Wilmer. Later for Wilson and NYT Wilsonians.

     Whereas almost none of Schönberg's row music ever equalled Pierrot Lunaire for sheer beauty of sound, Webern seems to have been far better equipped for this type of writing; in Das Augenlicht he devised a vocal polyphony which, despite a certain rigidity due to the alternating of homophonic and contrapuntal passages, attained a very high degree of aural refinement. [André Hodier, Since Debussy: a view of contemporary music, p. 73]

Doesn't the Hodier passage above compel us to tune into Arnold S.'s Pierrot  and Anton W.'s Augenlicht in order to find out what André is trying to tell us? Hodier's Jazz: It's Evolution and Essence is one of the best books ever written about jazz. His Since Debussy is also an outstanding work, as are his Toward Jazz and especially his The Worlds of Jazz. The works of the above noted authors - not Wilson - along with Paul Griffiths, Andrew Porter, and (of course) Sir Donald Tovey would straighten out the conceptual confusions of many of our present day philosophers of music aesthetics (if only they read them instead of, or in addition to, each other).
     Let's listen to Schönberg and Webern; let's find out about beauty - twelve-tone-row-wise.
     I had planned to go on with this; but I thought better of it. Plato's Meno is tugging at my coat.