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Current mood:  enthralled Category: Music
Check this out, I evidently ruffled flocks of feathers over at some big fat quasi corporate Jazz site. I'm not giving it free publicity, that's my deal, when I think some such entity sucks, I just don't mention it unless it is some real problem cause.
So I'm cranking out a piece to extol Vision Fest and one of my musician friends sends me this intense e mail about all the old bloated jazz pests now going tits up like the horrid JVC festival, the ghastly International association of Jazz Educators, major labels and all the hoggish suffocating things that helped to put old friends like Frank Lowe and Jeanne Lee in early graves and generally keep a lot of the Deep Ones down.
I did the Vision Fest piece on Sunday and put in my friends story near
the top for contrast. Of course it deftly disparaged all the fat bloat
things I described above.
It is a long complicated story I'll get to over in Brilliant Corners. It needs to be told in some engaging manner and I think I'm getting a handle on tone and narrative arc. But Why bug you all with it here?
This is about the funny part and boy do I mean fuuu...nnneee.
Monday night, I got me a snoot full of Guinness and Bushmills and do my usual ill considered stupid shit with a keyboard when sozzled.
To top the night off I lurched into a few short noxious shotgun blast pieces regarding the relative toxic impact of the International Association of Jazz Educators and that old pernicious kingmaker, George Wein.
It was gloriously rotten drunk asshole invective that you long suffering regulars see here from time to time, (although I usually delete it when sober if i think the writing sucks more than my par level,). The Rude Pundit would probably be prouda me.
SO one of the high traffic jazz bloat sites gloms onto the Vision Fest piece and the IAJE screed on consecutive days.
I get up hung over on Tuesday and check my analytics site data, a pleasant morning chore and go..HOLY SHIT!!! My site traffic went nuts. Instead of the usual devoted crew of 20 or so peeps who read my stuff it was like more than 200..YIKES!
So I pull up the source data and see the offending site is the culprit..what's with this? By then my friend is telling me what happened after another friend told him. Whee! So I hit the link, give the page a glance through bloodshot eyes and see I'm up at the top right..nice placement.. and it occurs to me that they aint too psyched..oh well.
Later I get another e mail from a fellow blogger in Chicago thanking me for 'speaking truth to power' and here I just thought it was a sloppy drunk rant.
My friend had wisely noted that these idiots only care about stupid controversy as Jazz web has gotten like shitty talk radio and Voila..proof staring me in the face.
Some people would be psyched to get that many hits after a low profile run but I'm just irritated. Why..you ask?
Well the real work I do is advocacy applied to writing. The most important stuff is soliciting profiles from under noticed free jazz peeps.(readers in that realm are welcome to do one) or writing fairly detailed descriptions of music on their cds.
These reviews are a bitch to do because Free Jazz is a very dense and elaborate idiom loaded with amazing musical epiphanies and ongoing catharsis. I have to listen OVER and OVER again sometimes for weeks while taking handwritten notes I eventually render into the piece.
This is evidently rare as many jazz scribblers are seemingly insecure about actually describing the music on the round flat thing and do all sorts of dull dodges to make up a word count, describing the peeps, wagging the tail and whatever anecdotal stories they can manage.
But for the purpose of useful record and a helpful musicology, it is essential to describe the sonic artifacts. That's what the pompous 'classical' scribblers do and, to me, African American art music oughta get some version of the same treatment..ya think?
Which brings me to the irritation. Where were these big jazz site boobs when I was posting these reviews, which I'm told are singular in their scope and quality by the subjects of them? Nooo, they gotta pump up a few lazy drunk rants that are utterly disposable and amount to little more than venting.
I haven't even examined whatever controversy threads might have erupted over at big boob jazz site as they were psyched to have something to stoke for this talk radio mentality controversity whipping it into a minor frenzy..jeeze.
Now I'm in their crosshairs and NPR also got into the act as I slagged them for their fern bar yuppie jazz shows..whee again. What a way to enter the world of toxic big media. But then I am a firm believer in putting a worst foot forward enroute to my mouth and I revel in my glorious insignificance, an art space gnome and building repair scrub playing with web2.
These clods probably have delusions of significance and for all I know may even get paid to slop their hogs. The joke is on them.
And I imagine the traffic will exhibit some statistical pattern after the ruckus subsides. Some folks will agree and like the little site and join my long suffering reader crew and some, probably most will think I'm a flaming asshole..which is fine. They'll probably obsessively check it for an interlude hoping I'll flog more obnoxious invective only to run into the usual stream of stuff and bore themselves away.
I figure I'm due for some big picture summary of the problem in some 'once upon a time mode', wag my stubby finger at a bunch of the culprits, (basically the same assholes who have fucked everything else in America up..Baby Boomers) and describe what I think happened to Free Jazz from the time I was born til now..it'll be fun.
10:10 PM
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