Stupid Mail

I find that what a non-musician has to say about music is generally not very important.  That goes double when he's a professional critic.  If he says it while playing hipster at Duncan's it goes heptuple.   They should invent a multiple just for that place, stultuple. 

Update:  No, I didn't read the replies.  I told you, Duncan's is a den of dolts.   I have found them to be pretty uniformly uninterested in actually reading what they stupidly think they're stupidly commenting on.  I'd invite them to read what they think they're responding to but it's nothing they'd do even if they knew they'd been invited.  

I assume that's the reason Duncan gave up and isn't even much bothering to go through the motions, anymore.  I do find it curious that, looking around just a tiny bit, he put on the ol' black arm band for Cokie Roberts.  I told you, he's going to be sour at sixty and encouraging people to vote Republican.  I don't trust people who are Reagan fans in their youth and who have a brief fling with play-lefty stuff in their early adulthood, only he's well into middle-age now.  

Update 2:  I think this review got the Eschaton Burns fandom, their motives and their tastes quite accurately:
 
It’s easy to see why. Burns boasts that his American trilogy-the Civil War, Baseball and Jazz-is at bottom a history of racial relations. But it’s not a history so much as a fantasy meant for the white suburban audiences who watch his movies. For Burns, it’s a story of a seamless movement toward integration: from slavery to emancipation, segregation to integration, animus to harmony. For every black hero, there is a white counterpart: Frederick Douglas/Lincoln, Jackie Robinson/Branch Rickey, Louis Armstrong/Tommy Dorsey. In other words, a feel-good narrative of white patronage and understanding.
This, in part, explains why Burns recoils from the fact that Davis, Coltrane, Coleman and their descendents have taken jazz not toward soft, white-friendly swing sound but deeper into the urban black experience. When Davis went electric, it was as significant a move as Dylan coming out on with a rock-and-roll band (and not just any band, but the Hawks). In 1966. Dylan was jeered by the folkie elites as a “Judas”; and, despite the fact that Bitches Brew went on to be one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time, Davis is still being slammed. Burns includes a quote in his film denouncing Davis’s excursions into fusion as a “denaturing” of jazz. 


The Burns style-drilled into viewers over his previous films, the Civil War, Baseball and Frank Lloyd Wright-is irritating and as condescending as any Masterpiece Theatre production of a minor novel by Trollope: episodic, monotonous, edgeless. By now his technique is as predictable as the plot of an episode of “Friends”: the zoom shot on a still photo, followed by a slow pan, a pull back, then a portentous pause-all the while a monotonous narration explains the obvious at length.

The series is narrated by a troika of neo-cons: Wynton Marsalis, the favorite trumpeter of the Lincoln Center patrons; writer Albert Murray, who chastised the militant elements of the civil rights and anti-war movements with his pal Ralph Ellison; and Stanley Crouch, the Ward Connerly of music critics. This trio plays the part that Shelby Foote did for Burns’ previous epic, the Civil War-a sentimental, morbid and revisionist take on what Foote, an unrepentant Southern romanticist, wistfully referred to as the war between the states.

 Instead of interviewing contemporary jazz musicians, Burns sought out Marsalis, a trumpeter who is stuck in the past. “When Marsalis was 19 he was a fine jazz trumpeter,” [*]says Pierre Sprey, president of Mapleshade Records, a jazz and blues label. “But he was getting his ass kicked every night in Art Blakey’s band. I don’t think he could keep up. And finally he retreated to safe waters. He’s a good classical trumpeter and thus he sees jazz as being a classical music. He has no clue what’s going on now.”

They're essentially a bunch of aging, white,  post-literate, suburban mid to upper middle class PBS watchers.   With a few trustifarians thrown in.

*  I remember rushing home from a meeting to hear the Chicago Jazz Festival back when PBS broadcast part of it (as I recall I wanted to hear the dying Helen Humes, but she had to cancel), heard Marsalis, very young, playing with Herbie Hancock and was wowed.  He hasn't wowed me much since then.