[Dixielandjazz] By George, Ned, half the friggin' secret is sloth!

[Don Ingle]

will connelly wrote:
> It is futile to argue with the peripatetic, omniscient and all-around
> seer plenipotentiary, His Exalted and Fragrant Cerebral Phosphorescence,
> who sat for a time at the Right Hand of the late K.O. Eckland to mentor
> and nourish the ninds, even as now, of unwashed multitudes.
>
> As the Maestro would have  taught had he not been so busy illuminating
> the root truth that we, by gum, invented jazz, a significant difference
> exists between how youthers are instructed and how they learn music in
> the US and in other lands.
>
> Fewer than one in a hundred US brass students, for example,  begin to
> achieve the near sinusoidal tonal purity, precision attack on each and
> every note at any tempo, and mastery of embellishments that toungle many
> a US tang but which are de regueur for British brass band artisans.
> The Brits In America, on the other hand, the main function of music
> education is to provide the athletic department with a band at half time
> during varsity football games. It is small wonder that members of bands
> that must swing and sway,   and in which sousaphone players must
> pirouette upon stages of mud, grass and snow might evoke a certain
> sloppiness in intonation and articulation  and carry these aptitudes
> into the saloon, there to productively employ the unusual chord
> progression learned by tripping in a gopher hole at the thirty yard
> line, the millisecond advance or retard of a note, and the  random
> semitone deviation as elements of jazz innovation.
>
> The musical sloth that distinguishes jazz from lesser forms is also 
> attributable to the fact that jazz plaayers areintrinsicaly romantic 
> figures who get laid a lot and sccordingly have less tim for practice
>
> Respectfully submitted ... and
> Kindly,
> Will Connelly
>
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Thank you, thank you, thank you Herr Professor Connelly for your 
insights and judiciously findings on the development of jazz.

To have read your words of wisdom, and being put into a a state of 
innocuous desuetude by the metabolic massage of the menses was 
invigorating at the least. Especially the part about getting laid a lot. 
(Perhaps I missed the workshop /lab!).

But I am indeed thankful that your have thus expressed the retort to 
some of the meadows muffins going on far too long on this thread. 
Perchance, we could get back to jazz which we can share with a little 
more scope in the myriad choices we have.

I subscribe to the theory that: If it sound good, listen. If it doesn't, 
turn it off.

Yours for further explorations of the music we call jazz but seem unable 
to fully describe in less than 20 posts.

I recall the words of wisdom of my mentor and first teacher, Ernest 
Loring Nichols, who summed up the basic truth to guide a life by in 
these succinct words: "The essence of good taste is simplicity."

As an old Scottish motto goes, "having done all - stand."

 From North Michigan where the temperature two nights ago in Cadillac 
was 34 degrees F.

Don (The glaciers are NOT melting this week) Ingle