Still loving the threads on Burns.
I haven't been able to catch the series on TV (will hopefully borrow DVD
set from generous friends) but I do have the book, and find myself a little
troubled by a few things. For one thing, I don't know about you all, but I
think Bitches Brew was a great record. . . not at all the "curious melange
of jazz and rock" that Burns sneeringly makes it out to be. For a lot of
jazz critics, there's an incredibly disturbing tendency to take *all*
fusion -- from "In a Silent Way" right through to some admittedly
deplorable Yellowjackets or Rippingtons pablam -- stuff it in a bag and
hurl it overboard. But that's like putting Frank Zappa, Jefferson
Airplane, Jimi Hendrix et. al. and lumping them in with Toto or Air Supply!
Bitches Brew, as popular as it was, was if anything as much of an *avant
garde* album as a "pop" one; the textures, grooves, Zawinal's awesome
comping, and yes, even the electronic effects, which would have been
radically new at the time. . . all of that is immensely challenging. Just
listen to other albums from the time, such as Herbie Hancock's "Sextant,"
and it seems ludicrous to throw out the baby with the bathwater, to dismiss
fusion as inherently a "sellout" music, and nothing more.
For that matter, why does he seem to applaud Jimmy Smith, Cannonball
Adderly's "Mercy Mercy Mercy," Horace Silver and others, and then make the
claim that they were "drowned out" by the supposed din of that evil
triumverate, rock, funk and fusion? Doesn't Jimmy Smith, to some extent,
have the same musical priorities as Miles Davis, or James Brown for that
matter? African-American music as a *groove-based* music?
In any event, I'm curious to know how he handled all this in the series,
though from the bitterness of the posts I've been reading, I suspect I
already know the answer. . .
Dale
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