Tyler Cowen, in a blog post from Thursday on what he's been reading lately: "Philip Freeman, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor. Call me crazy, but I think Sun Ra and Taylor are better and more important musically than say Duke Ellington. Freeman’s book is the first full-length biography of Taylor, and it is well-informed and properly appreciative. It induced me to buy another book by him. The evening I saw Taylor was one of the greatest of my life, I thank my mother for coming with me."
In the comments, "It Ain't Necessarily So" replied, "With respect, this is a bad take. Duke Ellington wrote a host of standards that are widely remembered today and arguably is the single most influential figure in the history of jazz. He wrote dozens of standards including 'Mood Indigo,' 'Satin Doll,' 'Caravan,' 'I Got it Bad and That Ain't Good,' and the inescapable 'It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got that Swing.' Even today, it's pretty common to hear at least one Ellington tune during any set in a jazz club. As an illustration of Ellington's importance, Cecil Taylor continued to perform Ellington compositions for most of his career. Also, Ellington's band was one of the most important and influential during the era when jazz was the most popular music of the day."
"To say that Sun Ra and Taylor, who came along in an era when jazz had been marginalized and ceased to be popular music, were more musically important than a figure like Duke Ellington, is a poor revisionist take on musical history."
This is one of those instances where I wish I could ask Robert Anton Wilson his opinion, perhaps jazzbos in RAW fandom such as Eric Wagner and Steve Fly can weigh in?
I am a huge fan of Duke Ellington. Although I consider myself reasonable conversant with jazz -- I've listened to Ellington, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Chick Corea, and other major figures -- I am not really familiar with music of Cecil Taylor or Sun Ra. I did some hasty Cecil Taylor research and borrowed Unit Structures from Hoopla, is there an obvious Sun Ra album to try, in the same vein that everyone who doesn't know Miles Davis is supposed to listen to Kind of Blue?
When I thought about Tyler's post, I realized it reminded me of this statement from Wilson: "James Joyce is more important than Jesus, Buddha and Shakespeare put together. Pound is the greatest poet in English. Thorne Smith should be reprinted immediately, and would be enormously popular with the current generation, I wager. The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best (and only) literature of our times. All of these opinions are pompous and aggressive, of course, but questions like this bring out the worst in me."
9 comments:
I love E-Prime. Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and Duke Ellington all seem very important to me. I love it that people listen to and praise their music. I don't think art reduces to a linear model, x > y. It seems to me like saying "red is better than green". One can love both colors, and one can love all three musicians. The music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago means more to me than the music of those three artists, but I can see how those three might mean more to many listeners than the music of the Art Ensemble does.
Note: It seems silly to me to say that Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra's music "were" less musically important because jazz had become less popular. In long run, popularity at a given point in time doesn't seem to a central concern for a work's lasting value.
For Cecil Taylor's music, I love the album "Momentum Space" with Cecil, Elvin Jones, and Dewey Redman. For Sun Ra, I love many of his albums, especially "Strange Celestial Road". Over the past two years I have watched the Sun Ra film "Space Is the Place" over and over again. The Max app has it.
Cowan appreciates what's happening on the fringes - the marginal revolution. I think he leans towards Sun Ra over Duke Elliott for that reason. I can't speak to the third.
I agree with Eric on his 'red is better than green' argument. A recent issue of Uncut magazine has the '500 greatest albums' ranked (the Beatles' Revolver is #1, if you wanna know). I find this type of thing incredibly silly, and totally beside the point of music, or art in general. I feel uncomfortable with the idea of establishing a hierarchy, and I think I don't even really like having a 'cannon' of sorts. That might be useful if you're a teenager discovering all this stuff and trying to make your way through the jungle, but apart from that...
Sun Ra took jazz (I would even say music) to places it had never been before. Does that make him better than Duke Ellington? More important? Why should that even matter? It seems to me that they were simply not doing the same thing at all, so why compare?
Tom, a good Sun Ra starting point could be a compilation such as To Those of Earth and Other Worlds. Although you're not getting the more outré free form cosmic blast offs. Maybe try to watch some live concert on YT, it really pays off to see the band performing I think.
The documentary A Joyful Noise is on YT as well, I recommend it.
Tom, I guess you haven't met the captain of the spaceship yet.
How is importance measured again? I sometimes forget - guess it's not been important to me... maybe its BUs (Beethoven Units)?
For calibration: please assign number of BUs to the importance of Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, Mel Blanc, Alan Alda, Madonna, Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin; then I will be able to tell you.
Anyway - trying to go apples to apples - those dudes don't have half the BUs of Ornette Coleman.
Thank you to everybody for the recommendations! I get the argument that ranking artists is silly, but I think album recommendations can be useful. And I do think "Revolver" is the best Beatles album, maybe the best rock music album of all time.
It seems fallacious to attempt to group disparate musicians under the illusory concept "most important jazz musicians". This relates to the unconscious assumption of Plato's ideal forms all of us in the West get programmed with. It doesn't say what question RAW responded too, but it seemed like his answer went deliberately over the top into hyperbole to parody the ridiculousness of the question.
Sun Ra blew my mind when I saw him perform in the early 80's. The album Space is the Place appears one of his classics. I don't know Cecil Taylor's work as well, I should know it better, I only have Unit Structures. I was scheduled to record him once for an album by a seminal hip hop group, The Jungle Brothers. He couldn't make it so we had to settle for Herbie Hancock. Duke Ellington seems an absolute giant in Jazz, but then so does Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Count Basie and I'm most certainly leaving some out. And we're just talking mainstream, musicians most music fans have heard of. For someone with equal stature, in my opinion, actually still alive and still in the game, there's my friend, the incredibly prolific John Zorn. There seems tons of important jazz music outside the mainstream, under most people's radar. To sum it up, everybody appears right – the Duke, Cecil, Sun Ra and all the ones I mentioned "are' the most important, and then some.
The jazz that you should talk about is the jazz you really dig, not worrying about what anyone would think and maybe not even mention anyone else, unless you're saying...you love Bird, who was influenced by greats like Coleman Hawkins or King Oliver and that he co-invented Bebop with Monk, Diz, Roach, Bud, etc: that sort of reference. We can denigrate another artist when trying to talk/write about the artist we're touting because they turn is on, but: is it worth it?
I realize this forces us to try to write about how the great music strikes us, what it does to us, why, what does it mean, etc: it's a difficult language game to tackle. But maybe we should try?
I love Rafi Zabor's writing about jazz. I enjoy Ethan Iverson's writing about jazz.
Another thing I've noticed is that Cowan takes a rather objective stance toward some curious things, like music. One of my first exposures to him was on a podcast (forget if his or he was a guest) but he thought some album by Queen was objectively perfect.
So all the discussion here is more about the subjectivity of music, which I think is wonderful. But I'm not sure Cowan thinks that way.
That first exposure rubbed me the wrong way in forming an opinion about Cowan, but Ive really come to appreciate him since. He;s a great podcast interviewer (and guest), and he's on the bleeding edge of AI as a consumer and love hearing what he has to say about that.
That said, while I'm rambling about Cowan, there are still examples where he gets caught up in his own reality tunnel and collides with a guest in spectacular fashion, Two examples interviews on my mind are his interviews with Ray Dalio and Jonathan Haidt, where he simply can't comprehend his guest and seems to short circuit.
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