henry flynt
as heard on the kenny g show 02.25.04
from : The Meaning of My Avant-Garde Hillbilly and Blues Music
"I was inspired by the image which Ornette Coleman had at the beginning of his career: the image of the untrained “folk creature” as avant-gardiste. (An image celebrated in A. B. Spellman’s Four Lives in the Bebop Business, 1966.) At the same time that I was discovering Coleman’s records, in 1960, I met La Monte Young in person. In addition to being an avant-garde composer, Young was a state-of-the-art jazz saxophonist. I had to come to Manhattan, to the milieu presided over by John Cage, to hang out with a musician who had jazz chops. (Chops—jazz slang for what Indians call knowledge of raga.) Young was also a pianist, and had created a rhythm part in which he “comped” for forty-five minutes or longer. He developed it to support Terry Jennings’ alto solos. I had the opportunity to play line instruments with his piano, rehearsing with him in 1961 and recording with him in January 1962. This is my earliest performance suitable for release. (For a fuller treatment of “La Monte’s Blues,” see my essay “La Monte Young in New York, 1960-62.”) La Monte’s example showed me that a departure from ethnic music could take a direction different from the quasi-atonal direction that was surfacing in jazz with Coltrane’s “Ascension” and Coleman’s Free Jazz. The expanded role which Young gave to riffing, in jazz that was tonal, almost modal, was highly important to me. Young’s well-known, but unpublished, saxophone playing in the Sixties made jazz entirely modal while opening it to “eternal” melodic exploration. [It would be more than fifteen years before I followed Young in this direction, with “C Tune.”]
I was aware of the rock ’n’ roll explosion as a violin student in the Fifties, even purchasing the sheet music of “Hound Dog” and “I’m In Love Again,” but I did not begin to listen to rock as a fan until I purchased my first Mississippi blues LP and began having reservations about jazz.
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- bill 2-25-2004 11:57 pm
as heard on the kenny g show 02.25.04
- bill 2-26-2004 12:11 am [add a comment]
from : The Meaning of My Avant-Garde Hillbilly and Blues Music
"I was inspired by the image which Ornette Coleman had at the beginning of his career: the image of the untrained “folk creature” as avant-gardiste. (An image celebrated in A. B. Spellman’s Four Lives in the Bebop Business, 1966.) At the same time that I was discovering Coleman’s records, in 1960, I met La Monte Young in person. In addition to being an avant-garde composer, Young was a state-of-the-art jazz saxophonist. I had to come to Manhattan, to the milieu presided over by John Cage, to hang out with a musician who had jazz chops. (Chops—jazz slang for what Indians call knowledge of raga.) Young was also a pianist, and had created a rhythm part in which he “comped” for forty-five minutes or longer. He developed it to support Terry Jennings’ alto solos. I had the opportunity to play line instruments with his piano, rehearsing with him in 1961 and recording with him in January 1962. This is my earliest performance suitable for release. (For a fuller treatment of “La Monte’s Blues,” see my essay “La Monte Young in New York, 1960-62.”) La Monte’s example showed me that a departure from ethnic music could take a direction different from the quasi-atonal direction that was surfacing in jazz with Coltrane’s “Ascension” and Coleman’s Free Jazz. The expanded role which Young gave to riffing, in jazz that was tonal, almost modal, was highly important to me. Young’s well-known, but unpublished, saxophone playing in the Sixties made jazz entirely modal while opening it to “eternal” melodic exploration. [It would be more than fifteen years before I followed Young in this direction, with “C Tune.”]
I was aware of the rock ’n’ roll explosion as a violin student in the Fifties, even purchasing the sheet music of “Hound Dog” and “I’m In Love Again,” but I did not begin to listen to rock as a fan until I purchased my first Mississippi blues LP and began having reservations about jazz.
- bill 2-26-2004 12:26 am [add a comment]