meditations on doing yesterday's music today

[LizzieMaine]

Dance music doesn't need scholars. All they do is write 500-page tomes in agate type imposing their own biases and prejudices and umpety-ump theories on the music, which are then read only by other music scholars. If I want to put on a Leo Reisman record and enjoy it, I don't need Tenured Professor B. L. O'Hard telling me why I enjoy it. I enjoy it because it's a good record of a good song. Anything else is codswollop.

 

[Fletch]

Dance music doesn't need scholars. All they do is write 500-page tomes in agate type imposing their own biases and prejudices and umpety-ump theories on the music, which are then read only by other music scholars. If I want to put on a Leo Reisman record and enjoy it, I don't need Tenured Professor B. L. O'Hard telling me why I enjoy it. I enjoy it because it's a good record of a good song. Anything else is codswollop.

What if it's unavailable? There's where scholars, at least the unlettered kind, are crucial.

As for the lettered kind, they're never going to give a wet slap anyway. The boundaries have been drawn on what's culture and what's not, and what's not takes decades to come back, if there's anything left of it at all.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've never found anything I wanted to listen to unavailable. As long as I've been alive, there have been piles of 78s and machines to play them on, and all I had to do was pick thru them and listen to find the ones that I liked. And I figured out the ones I liked by listening, not by reading.

The easiest way to leach the pleasure out of any form of popular culture is to hand it over to the beard-stroking intellectuals, who insist on holding it up by the hindquarters and sniffing at it instead of simply taking it for what it is and enjoying it on that basis. One of the reasons I cannot abide rock music -- aside from the music itself -- is the cadre of flea-bitten musicologists who insist on reading all levels of dubious profundity into what's supposed to be a "rebellion" against exactly the kind of self-satisified pomposity that they exemplify.

 

[twobarbreak]

Really good bass players don't slap, and few trombonists care to play plunger mute style way up in the trumpet midrange.

I'd be more incline to say only good bass players slap in Jazz (Trad, Dance music)!!!....at least the ones that want to work, and as a Trombone player I'd say almost everyone plays with Plungers in this older style of Jazz, heck very few don't.

 

[Mark D]

...The easiest way to leach the pleasure out of any form of popular culture is to hand it over to the beard-stroking intellectuals, who insist on holding it up by the hindquarters and sniffing at it instead of simply taking it for what it is and enjoying it on that basis. One of the reasons I cannot abide rock music -- aside from the music itself -- is the cadre of flea-bitten musicologists who insist on reading all levels of dubious profundity into what's supposed to be a "rebellion" against exactly the kind of self-satisified pomposity that they exemplify.

Thank you. I'm of the same opinion. However, I've never been able to express it so vividly.

I'll add to your comments concerning rock music that for similar reasons it pains me to see Jazz turned into something studied and served to the Carnegie Hall set.

 

[twobarbreak]

The easiest way to leach the pleasure out of any form of popular culture is to hand it over to the beard-stroking intellectuals,.

You think Rock and Roll scene is bad? The Jazz scene is worse, unlike Rock, Jazz has something
to intellectualize on....and Beards? hell they were those right on stage these days...lol