Matthew's Back in Town.

Image courtesy of Lena Adasheva.

While a debate over the pros and cons of mercantilism as applied to jazz rages below, I got an e mail from Mr Shipp last night to let me know he's back from a fabulous September that began in Brazil, took him through  another fat swath of former Soviet enclaves, saw him do a Poland jaunt with Mr. Morris and topped it off with a date in Amsterdam. He gets to relax for a bit before heading out to some dates in the US that are still less spectacular due to suckiness we've all come to expect and then it's back overseas.

Mr. Shipp is a bit of an anomaly in regards to all the earnest mercantile advice proffered in the comment stream, the remnants of Jazz Inc still go out of their way to pretend he barely exists cause he's so uppity. But they are choking to a point where an endorsement from the Apple Cart is about as useful as a Tea Party endorsement in his home state of Delaware.

The Apple Cart is filled with scribblers with biz models that began with Gutenberg. I'm talking about print advertising, the most backward shit out there and its premises and rationales still dominate jazz media. Howard probably still has his aol e mail account. It's like that. The world of jazz described or reviewed is still mainly ink stained wretches and pompous english majors moonlighting when it needs real musicologists or at least people who can play one on TV.

I see near zero evidence that most understand the web and how it works so they all lean on other dying things like EMI for ad money to prop up Joe Lovano. The brand hijack done by the pathetic New York "All About Jazz" is a case in point. The proprietor is a print idiot and he gulled provincial New York jazz biz rubes into wasting money on a paper that gets dumped in clubs, a few dying record stores and a scattering of restaurants where around a third of the heap is read by someone and the other two thirds land in the trash, month after month. But hey, the inflated circulation numbers do look good 'on paper'. 

There are a few radio biz people in the apple cart but that is semi obsolete too and doesn't deliver much more value than print. The best radio is exemplified by WFMU  and they aren't trying to control anything.Their costs are lower so they can run on a comparative shoestring. 

Mr. Shipp antagonizes these people so they diss him. He had a successful summer too with a Newport date that was all but ignored in the rush to prop up the carcass of old Brubeck and other failing business decisions. He's busting out despite that because the rest of the world doesn't give a rats ass about what media wheezebags in New York think. It's pretty funny.

I just bring it up because of how it undermines the mercantile assumptions which depend on some imagined fairness. No, it's not enough to make an appealing 'product'. It is also important to keep those feathers well preened and ruffling them makes the chickens squawk before heading off to roost as far away from the ruffler as possible.

All in all it's a great time of year. Coltrane's birthday just passed and Justin has it covered in his usual magical way. Roy Campbell Jr's birthday is tomorrow. Bud Powell's birthday was a few days ago. Mr Albertson reflects on the passing of Bessie Smith 73 years ago when he was a toddler in Iceland still innocent of a destiny that would weave her life with his.

And good old Brew has the crew here honored by his accolades.

And the real All About Jazz, the one I'm delighted to help for free so we can polish off the apple cart, just rolled out a critical and valuable site makeover that will put it in great shape to run with the newly exploding mobile wireless web as apple cart clods wonder if it's time to finally ditch their old AOL e mail accounts or maybe figure out what SEO means.

What, Me Worry? McCoy Tyner and the Pentatonic Scale-by Steve Provizer

It may be the most ubiquitous scale in the world and arguably the oldest. Anywhere in the world, when someone carves a flute, plucks a string or twangs a piece of metal they inevitably stumble into some variation of a 5-note-pentatonic-scale. It sounds good. It offers simplicity, yet potential for tension and relaxation. You can use it to create chants, melodies and twist it to suit your fancy. The blues, early jazz, then rock, are all about the pentatonic, with a few altered notes for good effect. But kids, in the early 1960's, something happened to pentatonic and its name was McCoy Tyner. The change was rooted in necessity-an uneasy adaptation to 'free' jazz, as I'll describe below. But 45 years later, reverberations from the changes wrought by the gifted Tyner are still ringing and for me, a re-evaluation, fresh ears and new adaptations are called for. Back in the 1960's, the question McCoy had to ask himself was: What do you do if you're playing a fixed-pitch instrument with someone(Coltrane) who has left the diatonic and chromatic restrictions of Western music behind; who has essentially bid adieu to the harmony that underlay jazz for the last-say-50 years. The answer, of course, is to find a way to fit in. McCoy's approach, his strategy, his solution, was to alter his playing so that the harmony he played was based on "perfect" intervals-4ths and 5ths-and yes, in this most sophisticated of musics, the musical scale this most accommodated was our old friend, the 'primitive' pentatonic scale. In McCoy's"open" harmony, almost anything could happen. Notes "not on the horn," as they say, could be at least partly accommodated. There was a transitional period when it seemed to work for Coltrane and other times when he asked McCoy to lay out. As the texture of Trane's music grew even denser, just changing the harmony wasn't enough and McCoy used another creative approach: shift the weight of the piano from melody and harmony to percussion. Pedal tones were one good way to do that-you could really land on those suckers-but it meant harmony was still in the mix. McCoy pushed percussiveness as far as he was comfortable, but he was not Cecil Taylor. Eventually, the fabric of Trane's music grew so dense that accompaniment as usually understood became superfluous. Ok-I've strayed. Pushing the piano's percussive envelope is a question for another time. It's the widespread leakage of McCoy's harmonic approach into the general language of jazz that feels off; like the kid who's too old, but shows up at the playground anyway and doesn't fit in the swing; kinda like Jelly Roll Morton's "Spanish Tinge" run amok. Come to think of it, let's play a Latin tune; Blue Bossa, maybe.