From left to right (above): Sidney Bechet’s soprano sax, Louis Armstrong’s first cornet, Lester Young’s tenor, Roy Eldridge’s trumpet Aficionados of practically anything enjoy the arcane, the ephemeral, the trivial, the obscure and even the bizarre about whatever it is that captures their devotion. Students of “serious” history are no exception. And they certainly don’t […]
We love movies. Hell, we love movies almost as much as we love music. But unlike creative American forms such as jazz, rock and country, movies are no more dead or alive today than they’ve ever been, which bodes well for cinema’s future. Or sounds its death knell. Whatever. We love ’em regardless. Combining these […]
We threatened to continue this diatribe, and so we will. Our contention is that creative American music all seemed to die at roughly the same time around 1980. We don’t mean that it disappeared. We simply mean that genres like jazz, country and rock all stopped evolving and either became repertory, classical forms, like jazz, […]
We mentioned in our last post that individual style, wherein a musician’s general sound is so unique and recognizable as to be unmistakably his alone, is a dead commodity in modern American music. We went on to say that one of the most fruitful periods and environments for this sort of individuality was that transitional […]