Byas Bias

Ethan Iverson directed our attention to Don Byas in a recent blog-post - Do The Math. Don Byas was tenor saxophone master whose playing bridged the swing and bebop eras. His greatness is certainly demonstrated in the fabulous Coleman Hawkins' Keynote recordings featuring Don Byas, Tab Smith, and Harry Carney. Byas's Town Hall performance of "I got rhythm" with Slam Stewart on contra-bass   is one of the great recorded musical works of art and saxophone artistry. Mr Iverson's transcription of Mr Byas's solo can be found on Do The Math also.
  Story Time. I think that I told this Byas story before - I don't remember where I got it from; it is worth retelling. Don Byas's home base was in Europe for a number of years. He had a regular gig at a club in Paris France. Musicians from the USA would look up Byas to hear what he was playing when visiting or giging in Europe. One evening, Byas, while he was performing, saw John Coltrane come in the club and take a seat at the back of the club. After a couple of sets, Byas went up to Trane and asked him how long he had been sitting there. Trane told Byas that he had just come in! It must have been quite a saxophone lesson that Byas gave.

Amadeus Café - Ann Arbor, Mi. 22 June 2012

It's Been A Long, Long and a Hot, Hot While

The much anticipated Part 2 remains unwritten and (worse) unthought about. Summertime summons my attention to Gustav Mahler's music (to his life and his wife, Alma) and to music for clarinet - Finzi, Brahms and Mozart. There's a lot of clarinet action in Mahler's music too - in addition to marches, cowbells &c.
  My wife and I had a delightful few days with our three grand daughters in Ann Arbor/Chelsea, Michigan and with our youngest grand daughter and our son in Columbus earlier this week.
  I plan to blog on about what I've been reading and the music that has captivated me. Hopefully the heatwave will subside in a day or two. Be Cool.

Intermezzo

I've been in the middle of finishing David Schiff's wonderful book, The Ellington Century; rereading Albert Murray's great book, Stomping The Blues; reading Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones; and being 100 pages into Jens Malte Fischer's recent  biography, Gustav Mahler - I'll tell my reader(s) whether it's wonderful, great or whatever later. I've also been listening to great balls of Mahler - especially his songs - and Duke Ellington. These great composer-musicians provide clues for understanding each other's compositional techniques - the use of woodwinds and brass, for example.

  I'm not a big fan of symphonic music. But what I find compelling about Mahler's music and his use of large symphonic forces is that one can hear the orchestral parts set out with utter clarity - Mahler's bassoon and clarinets and Ellington's clarinets and trombone. Thus Mahler makes the hugh orchestras required for his music sound like a small ensemble, while Ellington makes his sixteen or so musicians sound quite grand indeed. (These words bring to mind Charles Rosen's essay, "The Irrelevance of Serious Music" in his Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New.)

  Part 2 of my previous post next time, unless. . . .

Working on Part 2

I have been occupied with other matters in addition to working on Part 2. The wait may not be worth it - I suspect, however, that what I'll have to say will not be without interest.

So there you haven't got it.

The Blues Tradition & Minimalist Philosophy, Part 1

Academic philosophers seem to be in a position (fix?) that the composer Astor Piazzolla found himself in when he went to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. As the story goes, Piazzolla's composition exercises were lacking, in Boulanger's eyes, that certain something: lacking in interest - both for Piazzolla and Boulanger - let's say. Nadia asked Astor, What kind of music do you really like? He replied, Tango.

  It's difficult for me to imagine that today's Anglo-American philosophers like what they are doing. How many major philosophers are/were there? We have Quine, Goodman, Chisholm, Sellars, Putnam, Strawson, Dummett, Grice, Williams, Ayer, Evans, Lewis, & a few others. Among the living we have Armstrong, Kripke, Gibbard, McDowell, Wright, Tennant, Maddy, Shapiro & a few others. Are there any major philosophers in aesthetics? There's Danto, Scrutton, Levinson & very few others. An interesting counter-instance is Stanley Cavell. I asked a philosopher I know, a specialist in aesthetics, what he thought of Cavell's work in aesthetics. My acquaintance replied that he didn't understand Cavell. Now, I have a far greater understanding of what Cavell says than I have of my acquaintance's work. But he may have meant that he understood Cavell in a deep sense? I doubt it.
  The major, major, A+ philosophers were of course Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein. Broad and Ryle are personal favorites of mine along with the A+ Trinity. Lesser lights thinking about and writing aesthetics offer aesthetics AS IF, as if aesthetics were cognitive science, linguistics, metaphysics, philosophy of science. These lesser lights are often quick to eschew criticism as having anything to do with aesthetics; reckoning their betters: Andre Hodeir, Charles Rosen, Gunther Schuller, Paul Griffiths, and Amiri Imamu Baraka as being non-philosophers (a good thing) and therefore lacking the proper training - after all there's the philosophy of criticism! - The philosopher Andy Hamilton, gets a well-deserved pass. Why? Read his Aesthetics & Music to find out why. 

  Admittedly there are and have been a few bright lights writing philosophy since Bertie's and Witters' time. But the era of acknowledgements, footnotes, and parenthesis makes a great deal of what goes under the heading of Philosophy unreadable or very painful reading at best. It's a good thing that we find philosophers paying greater attention to the historical roots of their subject. It also helps the subject when major philosophers are paired-off in argument with each other - such pairings as Russell and Bradley, Sellars and Bergmann /Chisholm and Strawson and Quine are instructive examples. Remember the days when major cats argued with each other? Precious.  

 Indeed, training in maths, physics, linguistics, painting, and/or music is very worthwhile for professional philosophers. But in addition to training, love and passion for philosophy are also necessary for a philosophers to have and to make manifest in getting their views across to an educated readership. Getting things across to colleagues is another matter, a matter of cross-purposes and talking past one another. So we've been subjected to a blizzard of refashioned dissertations and a Babel of comments on the work of the 'rich and famous' by academicians on the make. I think it's a wonderful thing that Kripke doesn't reply to the chatter about his important work - he'd never get any real work done.  

  The foregoing remarks bring me to the archeologist and Oxford philosopher, R. G. Collingwood and the philosopher and man of letters, Albert Murray - a potentially instructive pairing.
  Collingwood's residence in Oxford was a hundred yards away from the digs of another, even more famous, Oxford philosopher, the idealist F. H. Bradley. It seems that these two great Oxford men rarely had contact with each other - Collingwood writes in his Autobiography that he only set eyes on Bradley on one ocassion. He does relate that Bradley had an aversion to cats, going so far as to hunt strays down with a rifle that he kept. Collingwood, like  Bradley, kept to himself philosophically. The former sailed against the Cambridge tides of Russell and Moore - Wittgenstein barely gets a mention in Collingwood's writings. Bradley and Russell did get into it about the nature and reality of relations - being to the left of, for example. He was quite dismayed by the lack of his contemporaries' disregard for the history of philosophy and for the study history. He was apposed the philosophers who professed a kinship with realist doctrines. He argued that a realist epistemology could not account for historical facts, since the data of history were certainly not present to the minds of beholders, as a realist epistemology required. How does a realist account for testimony, for example. Collingwood writes, "My work in archaeology . . . impressed upon me the importance of the 'questioning activity' in knowledge . . . ." An Autobigraphy, p. 30. What Collingwood is getting at here
  Albert Murray's Stomping the Blues was originally published by McGraw-Hill in 1976. I read Murray's book 15 years ago. Another monumental study of the blues and swing traditions is the composer Gunther Schuller's The Swing Era. The composer David Schiff has published this year another monumental study of the aforementioned traditions, The Ellington Century, University of California Press. The Ellington century is that of Debussy, Ravel, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Bartók,  Seeger, Armstrong, Monk, Parker, Young, Hawkins et al. Schiff connects the musics of these composers by rigorously examining their masterpieces, and displaying the fundamental and revolutionary principles  involved in their compositions and manifest in their individual(-ist) styles. Just as important as Schiff's devotion to music matters is his insistence on a thorough examination of the Ellington century's racialist culture.
  As an exercise, preparatory to Part 2 hereof, I urge my reader(s) to listen carefully to Duke Ellington's May 4, 1940 recording of "Cottontail", featuring Cootie Williams, Ben Webster, Harry Carney, and Duke Ellington as soloists. After listening to "Cottontail" a few/many times, listen to the 1st movement of Claude Debussy's String Quartet many times. Ellington will help with hearing Debussy.  Read David Schiff on "Cottontail"!  


http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1029573.ece

      

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington - 29 April 1899

Happy birthday Duke.