Jazz in Search of Itself by Larry Kart

[walto]

A collection of Larry Kart's jazz pieces has recently been issued by Yale University Press. If anybody is interested, my review is in the new Paris Transatlantic.http://paristransatlantic.com/magazi...un_text.html#4

[Derek Taylor]

Nice review, Walt. I've been meaning to pick this book up & your incisive points only push it higher on the want list.

I knew it was only a matter of time before you went & pulled a Shipp! Retirement's over, baby!

[relyles]

I own and have read this book and also found it to be extremely satisfying. I purchased it as a result of an exchange I had with Mr. Kart regarding David Murray on another bulleting board. Although I do not agree with everything Mr. Kart says, his analysis and presentation of his opinions was always impressive. Most importantly, I found the book simply very entertaining and found myself devoting every free moment to reading it until I finished the entire book

[walto]

Originally Posted by Derek Taylor

Nice review, Walt. I've been meaning to pick this book up & your incisive points only push it higher on the want list.

I knew it was only a matter of time before you went & pulled a Shipp! Retirement's over, baby!

Thanks for the welcome and the analogy, Derek, but the only thing I ever retired from was reviewing records. I don't expect to be recanting....

[Derek Taylor]

Ah, now you come out with the caveat.

Well book reviews are better than nothing I suppose & I'm not abandoning all hope that a recant is in the cards, eventually.

[Nate Dorward]

Walter--good to see the review, though I'm a bit surprised you didn't like the intro much, as I thought it'd appeal to your interest in thorny issues of aesthetics..? Surely the two isolated quotes from Dahlhaus & Gasset aren't especially difficult, or even if so they're not crucial to the argument. The point of the Dalhaus quote is, in short, that while for Kart jazz is crucially a form of self-expression, it's not just a matter of direct musical autobiography: the "I" that is expressed is more like the "I" of a lyric poem. In the avantgarde poetic circles I move in "lyric I" or "self-expression" are usually bad words, so on the face of it Kart's emphasis on these ideas should make me nervous. But I think "self" in his writing is more like the prefix than the noun, as in "self-critical" or "self-conscious". For Kart I think musicians (or certain musicians anyway) are often importantly asking questions about identity, about coherence, about the possibility of sharing ways of seeing the world: like it's asking, "What is this 'self'? What can it do, or what can I do with it, within music? How does music shape it?" Kart treasures this level of self-reflexivity within the act of improvisation--i.e. making a statement and also simultaneously triggering all sorts of reflections on the wider context of that statement. It's importantly similar to what the New American Poets of the midcentury were doing, especially Robert Creeley: this is a connection impressed on me by the receipt of a fine essay on Creeley by Peter Middleton (which I published in The Gig 18 if anyone's curious) at the same time I was reading Kart's book. (Larry I should add confirmed when I asked how important Creeley & other contemporaries of his were to him, though he was skeptical of aspects of Middleton's style & thesis in that essay.)

Small correction: Derek Bailey is mentioned at least twice in the intro, & I'm pretty sure Braxton & Sun Ra get passing mentions elsewhere. But it's hard to track down cites because Yale UP in their infinite wisdom omitted to provide an index. Groan.

[walto]

Thanks for the corrections, Nate.

As for the intro, I didn't find it at all either interesting or enlightening myself, but I admit that sort of discussion is not my cup of tea. For me, aesthetics generally has to be of either the Tolstoy type or the analytic philosophy type, or I probably won't get what's going on. (Perhaps you've seen some of my unkind remarks about semiotics?)

OTOH, I loved the rest of the book!

[J Lee]

Walto -- would you mind directing me to certain of your writings on aesthetics? (I have access to a not-bad research library if you're able to provide citations.) It's not a topic I've much considered, but I suspect we share a similar orientation, and I'd like to read further, even if, instead of clarifying my own stance, I merely confirm or deny my suspicion. I'd also like to read a sizzling hot rebuke of those so-called semioticians, purely for pleasure.

[Nate Dorward]

Walter--no I don't recall your comments on semiotics. Not a field that I'd think is close to what Kart's doing, though.

J.Lee: the library's full of critiques against contemporary "theory"/semiotics/whathaveyou, of a rainbow variety of shades of temperateness & intemperateness.

[walto]

JLEE, my background is in analytic philosophy, but I've never written anything on aesthetics myself (with the minor exception of a lengthy review of Eddie Prevost's recent book, which can found both at the One Final Note and the Paris Transatlantic websites (the review, not the book--there's also a reply from Prevost at OFN). I don't think I ever had a course specifically on that subject, either as an undergraduate or in graduate school.

Here at JC, I've twice posted lengthy excerpts from a paper by American philsopher Everett Hall who had almost completed a book on aesthetics when he died in 1960. Hall is a favorite of mine. Though he never quite got his stuff on aesthetics together, his books What is Value (on ontology and philosophy of language) and Our Knowledge of Fact and Value (on epistemology), are it for me. I'm sure philosophy has gone quite a bit further in the past 50 years, but I'm afraid I've stalled out at Hall.

Re semiotics, which I know absolutely nothing about, you can find a few of my nasty remarks in various back-and-forths between Prof. Bill Ashline and me here at JC over the last couple of years, if you search around a bit. Though we're not currently fighting (I don't think), we've never hit it off too well, if you want to know. You may also wish to see Bill's "criticism" of my review of Prevost somewhere at the bagatellen site.