Here's the weekday morning ritual. After I've let the dog out, made two pots of coffee (one for consumption now, the other for TheWife™ to take to work), had some breakfast (lately, oatmeal), helped TheWife™ out to her Jeep with her stuff (dang, teachers carry a lot of stuff), and retrieved the newspapers from the box down at the road (with the "help" of the dog, meaning that he just loves to race me back up the driveway), I get to relax with a cup of coffee. Soon after this, it's upstairs for a shower.
After showering and dressing, I find myself sitting on the bedroom couch, my squeaky clean bare feet ready for socks & shoes. Every danged morning Every so often, while I'm pulling on my sneakers, the books on the shelves start to talk to me. "Read me!" "Don't go to work!" "Yes, stay home and read!" Damned books.
Well, work obligations forced me to ignore the pleadings of our book collection. Still, one book in particular did catch my eye. I pulled it off the shelf, flipped it open and: "In general, Lou is not excessively fond of other members of the human race, so this album is, or wants to be, some kind of ultimate antisocial act. When the MC5 debuted, John Sinclair said that they and their music would 'make you feel it, or leave the room.' Lou wants to make music that'll make you feel it and leave the room. That way he can be happy: alone with his machines." That was the late great Lester Bangs starting off an essay on Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.
This got me to thinking that Bangs' characterization, "not excessively fond of other members of the human race," would likely be applied by most people to many records in my collection. John Coltrane's Interstellar Space, Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, Diamanda Galas' Plague Mass, just about anything by Derek Bailey. The list is not endless but certainly extensive.
Article comments
1 - JR
"...as anyone who has witnessed a free improv performance knows, something amazing happens, and it's important to try to figure out what that something is, what makes it happen and how it can be composed with."
Interesting quote. To me it implies that free improv is a means to an end - a tool for composing non-free music. On the other hand, performing free improv seems to be predicated on notion that the means are the end.
If you never go on to compose (or listen to) the music based on what was learned from free improv, is free improv still worthwhile? Can you enjoy something as a process, even if the fact that it is never taken any farther implies that it's not really part of a process?
2 - Mark Saleski
good questions. this is why i think that for most people, seeing a performance of this kind of thing can be far more interesting than listening to a recording.
i've been at shows where i've been fascinated by what was going on with the group of performers...with thoughts like "how are they going to get out of this mess?" and "are they lost?"
3 - Mark Sahm
You guys and your trademarked wife names.
4 - Pico
Oh no, it's TheHeckler™
;&)
-P
5 - DJRadiohead
Congrats, Saleski, this has been selected as an Editor's Pick by Asst. Music Editor DJRadiohead.
6 - Scott Elliott
The music is garbage. Your over analyzing a piece of garbage. Review something with a tune.
7 - Mark Saleski
no thank you. maybe next week.