Ich mach’s mir auch einfach… das folgende aus Dan Warburtons lesenswertem Interview mit Sunny Murray:
Murray: […] People talk about you when you’re rich, or when you become scandalous. But if you’ve got quality in your work, it’s more difficult to make money – quality doesn’t sell as well as mediocrity. The art world accepts a lot of mediocrity. It’s not as pure or refined as it should be. Record sales, market research, they don’t take into account what we’re playing. Folk music. Louis Armstrong, Chick Webb onwards… it’s really folk music, American folk music. You go to Armenia or Greece or Turkey and listen to folk music and it is folk music, because there’s never been commercial marketing and profiteering done on it. Where American jazz is concerned, the originality has been diluted because of profiteering and exploitation and the music hasn’t been allowed to revise itself constantly enough. For me, Cecil was a product of the refinement of the music of the period, and nowadays that’s not happening anymore. Now we’re going to sort of stagnate in a kind of historical museum kind of thing.
When did it begin to go off the rails, do you think? With the kind of crossover albums that Pharoah Sanders started releasing?
I think Pharoah got lost too. When he started playing with John he was at least trying to be free; when he left John, you would have thought he’d continue that idea, but he jumped back into the blues. He played good blues. I was there when he arrived in New York, this guy walking up 8th Street with his saxophone and his shoes that were so worn out it looked like his socks had been run over. We were sitting outside this jam session place called The Dome with Frank Lowe and Pharoah came up and stopped. He looked really worn out, he’d been walking a lot. He said: “You having a session? I’d like to play…” I said, “You look like a crow, man, feathers all raggedy and shit!” Anyway, he picked up a beer and went in and played. He never played around with guys the way Albert did though. He played with Sun Ra for a while.
No, we all got lost in the 1980s. The concepts became rather confused. Musicians didn’t know what they wanted to play – you had a lot of alternative styles, which was original, but it was also the basis for a kind of crass profiteering. For me it got off track in about 1976. Cecil was becoming very popular, some underdogs were becoming heroes, but the new groups weren’t as professional, they didn’t have the experience and didn’t play with the heroes to redevelop and redefine what they were doing. The only way you could get into the avant-garde flow in 1976 was to work with people like Ornette and Cecil, or to get their information to help you make your own music progress. As far as drummers went, there was Milford, Rashied [Ali] and Andrew [Cyrille], who were the extremists of where I was coming from, but at the same time there was still Eddie Blackwell, Steve McCall and Dennis Charles. They’d progressed and become part of the hero system too – Eddie with Ornette and Don Cherry, Steve with Air and David Murray, Dennis with Billy Bang and other great musicians. But there was a lot of amateur avant-garde at that time too, especially in Europe…
Find ich letztlich von der Typologie her auch sehr anregend, aber der zentrale Punkt ist: Wynetone ist genau dieses Museum, konserviert im Lincoln Center, wo in den 60ern noch ganz andere Töne zu hören waren (mehr dazu in meinem bald erscheinenden 1966er Post im ChronoTrane-Thread).
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #151: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv – 09.04., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba