Author Archives: oook

Jazz and ageing and sf

Co-incidentally, over at The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik’s Postscript for Whitney Balliett has this nice bit:

As the music he loved aged, he was often left without a subject, and those of us who revered his writing sometimes wished that he could have discovered in himself a more sympathetic ear for the sounds of newer jazz. But he was too honest to pretend to admire what he didn’t, and it was the great American music of the twenties through the eighties (the seventies, a jazz Indian summer in New York, were a high-water mark for him) that remained his subject… (12 Feb 2007, pg. 31)

In a related vein, my recent encounter with the video of Harlan Ellison reading Prince Myshkin (click on ‘Prince Myshkin’) led me to revisiting the Ellison-edited Again, Dangerous Visions “speculative fiction” anthology of 1972, and that, in turn, provoked this scribbled rumination:

1972 to 2007: 35 years, and still the stories seem fresh –or perhaps it’s that those issues still define what’s important for me, like Ursula LeGuin’s “The Word for World is Forest”, which is at base an examination of Ecology.
And it was Ecology that was the epicenter for my Generation, though my own take on it was more geospatial than energetic.
But the moniker “speculative fiction” (in Ellison’s Introduction to the collection, and elsewhere) is worth considering anew. I just have this feeling that the world would have gone another way if more people had read this stuff…

So here I am, drifting toward joining those “old guys” who remember and value what others have forgotten, or are so young as to never have known…

The Jazz Age

Dan Visel has an interesting meditation on collaboration-and-design over at sidebar (“the back porch of the Institute for the Future of the Book”). It’s all worth a thoughtful read, but for me the money quotes are near the end, where the title of the piece (“the jazz age”) earns its keep:

I’m not arguing that collaboration can’t create something as grand as a symphony. It certainly can. But the things that collaboration can create are qualitatively different, and should be understood as such. (Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects could be brought in here, though that’s been explored before.) When we think of collaboration in music, we don’t think of the classical tradition; we think about jazz. I think that’s a useful reference point: collaborators on networked books could be like jazz musicians, not having a score, but knowing how to improvise within predefined structures like twelve-bar blues. Even free jazz isn’t free, though: when you listen to those old Ornette Coleman records now, the first thing you notice is how carefully structured they seem.
(There’s something interesting about jazz becoming culturally dominant at the height of modernism; perhaps this is a natural response. Around the same time, the Surrealists were denigrating the novel as a form because it was too planned, too rational. They declared a similar preference for the improvised: automatic writing or drawing for example. There’s an enormous amount of Surrealist poetry; a near-complete count of Surrealist novels could be made on two hands. [hmmm? take a look at City Lights offerings])
What we need to be thinking about is how jazz players learn to be jazz players. You can’t stick a classically trained trumpeter in a jazz combo and expect he’ll do a fine job: he won’t. But that’s essentially what we’re trying to do.
And: we need to be looking at how jazz is designed: what sort of structures lend themselves to improvisation and collaboration?

links for 2007-02-07

The Ecstasy of Repurposing

From Open Source, about an impending show:

We can’t stop talking about Jonathan Lethem’s essay in this month’s Harper’s. If you haven’t read it, you really should. Nothing that follows in this post will be nearly as interesting. Go ahead. And this post will still be here when you return. You know you want to.

Those of us fascinated by the cultural phenomenon (and the practical process) of mashups and the general subject of repurposing will be especially interested in both the essay and the forthcoming podcast.